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

[Jan de Groot]

On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 12:39 -0400, Daenyth Blank wrote:
> On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 22:45, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> 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
> 
> I think it depends how difficult it is to work around. What's involved
> for a user who would be affected by this?

The user would have to recompile glibc from source. The user will need
to do that from a different system though, as all the user is getting
after upgrading glibc is "FATAL: Kernel too old" on every command
executed. No way to revert to an older glibc, because not a single
command will execute. This is why I don't like bumping this beyond
2.6.18.