[arch-dev-public] glibc and minimum kernel version

[Jan de Groot]

On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 12:45 +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
> Now glibc-2.10 is out, I will be preparing another toolchain rebuild.  
> One question that has been discussed previously is bumping the minimum 
> kernel required by glibc.  Bumping it too recent is full of stupid, but 
> bumping it some would cut down on some unnecessary glibc workaround code.
> 
> I am thinking that the minimal kernel version should be 2.6.22 which was 
> released two years ago. It is the lowest kernel version that udev works 
> with so people using kernels older than that need to do some workarounds 
> anyway.
> 
> Any comments/objections? 
> 
> Allan
> 

-1, keep it at 2.6.18 as minimum, which is the kernel supported by quite
some others:
- Xen
- CentOS/RHEL
- Debian Etch

Bumping it to anything higher will cause chroots or xen installations on
these setups to fail. Especially Xen is something you want to keep
compatibility with. As for udev that doesn't work with older kernels:
there's always something called static /dev that people can use as a
workaround, and chroots don't need udev anyways.