[arch-dev-public] Minimal kernel version

[Allan McRae]

On 06/05/11 05:06, Stéphane Gaudreault wrote:
> Le 5 mai 2011 14:20:31, Dan McGee a écrit :
>> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 12:58 PM, Tom Gundersen<teg at jklm.no>  wrote:
>>> Hi guys,
>>>
>>> As far as I understand the minimal kernel version we support is
>>> 2.6.27. This is at least due to glibc and udev.
>>>
>>> I thought it would be worth noting that as of its next release udev
>>> will require kernel version 2.6.32:
>>> <http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/hotplug/udev.git;a=commit;h=67a77c8bf299f
>>> 6264f001677becd056316ebce2f>.
>>>
>>> Maybe this could be an opportunity to raise the requirement across the
>>> board, and also to make a news item about this?
>>
>> Not to be the thorn in the side of progress, but we can't keep
>> changing this every six months on a whim unless we truly don't care
>> about some semblance of stability and uptime. We last changed this
>> less than 5 months ago[1], and before that, 21 months ago[2]. I think
>> there needs to be an extremely valid reason someone can't have a
>> machine with uptime approaching a year in duration. I'm sure there are
>> people running pre-2.6.32 kernels out there even though we don't
>> currently package one- it was only released in December 2009, so 18
>> months ago.
>>
>> So obviously if you update udev on your system, you should be expected
>> to run a kernel that satisfies the requirement, but I don't think we
>> should force people to jump from the 2.6.27 level we established only
>> 5 months ago just yet if at all possible.
>>
>> -Dan
>>
>> [1]
>> http://www.archlinux.org/news/minimum-required-kernel-version-increased-1/
>> [2] http://www.archlinux.org/news/udev-minimum-kernel-version/
>
> I might be wrong on this because I do not have all the information, but I
> think that one of the consequence of our choice to set minimum version to
> 2.6.27 is that we need to patch the glibc to avoid a threading issue on
> x86_64[1]. This problem do not seems to happen if glibc is builded for 2.6.32.
>
> Again, I do not have all information on this. Allan might have a more informed
> opinion on this issue.
>
> Stéphane
>
> [1] http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12403
>

That is a small issue that is fixed and no longer a concern, so it not a 
reason to increase minimum required kernel version.

When I increased the required version to 2.6.27, I selected that version 
because that was the latest supported upstream  (i.e. by the kernel 
developers).  That situation still has not changed.

I will note that Fedora (and RHEL6?) uses 2.6.32 as their minimum.

Allan