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

[Dan McGee]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Ionuț Bîru <ibiru at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 12/11/2010 05:49 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am in the progress of updating the toolchain and thought it time to
>> review what our minimum required kernel version is for glibc.
>>
>> For those that do not know, assuming a newer kernel allows glibc to have
>> less workarounds compiled in. So it may be advantagous to have a more
>> recent version as the minimum required. This comes at the obvious cost
>> of not having support for older kernels so a tradeoff is needed... When
>> we discussed this 18 months ago, it was decided 2.6.18 was appropraite
>> then, but much has changed since.
>>
>> I am going to suggest that we follow the oldest longterm support kernel.
>> That would now be the 2.6.27.x series, which has been around for over
>> two years.
>>
>> That might be being overly bold, so feel free to point out how much such
>> an update would break... and suggest an alternative minimum.
>>
>> Allan
>
> all companies that sell openvz vps use 2.6.18 kernel. I have one and i would
> prefer to minimal kernel version to be the same.

I feel odd being on the other time of the argument this time- last
time I advocated we stick with 2.6.18 because Xen still used that as
their defacto guest kernel. But these days are past, and if there are
really still providers that can't do better, they are not serving
their customers well at all.

Especially given Allan's later comment stating that Fedora is moving
to 2.6.32 compat, I don't see any reason for us to not move to 2.6.27
as the minimum version supported.

-Dan

P.S. Pierre, you must be on some super-secret release list, I never
saw the announcement for 3.6.18. :)