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

[Matthew Monaco]

On 12/11/2010 10:49 AM, 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
>

The workarounds obviously make maintainence a little more difficult, but is 
there a performance hit too? Could a glibc and glibc-legacy/glibc-compat type of 
thing be a viable solution? Then the question would be what kernel defines the 
line between the two glibc packages (probably -lts would be good).