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Re: Requiring Linux 3.2, again
On Thu, 4 May 2017, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> What about the next step though? And the next? Moving beyond linux 3.10 would
> mean that any future RHEL which is rebased to the newest glibc would not be
> able to easily run in a container on RHEL 7 using a RHEL 7 kernel.
> Taking note that RHEL7 has support until 2024 at a minimum.
My view is that we base things on the oldest supported kernel version
listed at https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html - remembering that
distributions supporting a distribution kernel long term may choose to
contribute to maintaining the upstream kernel for the community, and this
may mean some of the kernels listed there in fact live on with other
maintainers beyond the dates currently shown there.
Based on the dates shown there, we might consider moving from a 3.2
minimum to a 3.16 minimum for glibc 2.28 (Aug 2018) or 2.29 (Feb 2019).
But actually it doesn't look like there's any difference between 3.2 and
3.16 for features glibc cares about on x86 / x86_64 (whereas there *are*
cleanups possible by moving from 2.6.32 to 3.2), so there would be very
little cost to keeping the version back on some architectures (while
moving to require 3.16 on other architectures) if that makes sense at the
time. And of course if 3.10, say, is in fact still supported when 3.2
ceases to be, that rather than 3.16 would be the version to consider.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com