Re: Requiring Linux 3.2, again

[Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb dot de>]

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 1:26 PM, Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> When we discussed moving to Linux 3.2 as the minimum kernel version
> requirement for glibc over a year ago, concerns were expressed about how
> this would affect some containers
> <https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2016-02/threads.html#00173> and we
> only had consensus for a change for architectures other than x86 / x86_64.
>
> Now that more than a year has passed and 2.6.32 has been EOL for a year
> more, do people still care about running distributions from late 2017 or
> later on such old kernels, or can we now move to a 3.2 minimum globally?

I looked again at my list of distro packages from
https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2016-02/msg00284.html

* Fedora is unchanged, passing --enable-kernel=2.6.32, matching the kernel
  in the RHEL6 release, EOL date for RHEL6 is 11/30/2020.

* Debian is unchanged, requiring 2.6.32 on x86 (32 and 64 bit) but 3.2
elsewhere.
  2.6.32 was used in Debian 6 (Squeeze) which is now EOL.

* Ubuntu now requires 3.2 on all architectures, changed from last year.

* OpenSUSE is unchanged, requiring 3.0 for compatibility with SLES11 kernels,
  SLES11 support ends 31 Mar 2019 or 31 Mar 2022 (for extended support)

* Arch Linux is unchanged, still using --enable-kernel=2.6.32

* Gentoo is unchanged, not passing --enable-kernel= on any architecture.

* Further, I found that "OpenVZ-legacy (RHEL6 based)" uses a 2.6.32 kernel
  and has a projected EOL date of Nov 2019. This was the latest release
  a year ago, but OpenVZ 7 was released in July 2016 and uses a 3.10 kernel.

Both SLES11 and RHEL6 support LXC containers, which like OpenVZ are in
theory able to run the latest x86 distros except for Ubuntu because of
the glibc kernel version check. OpenSUSE (and presumably the next
SLES release based on it) will run in LXC on SLES11 but not on RHEL6.

      Arnd