Linux kernel version support policy

[Rich Felker]

On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 07:47:13PM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Monday, January 27, 2014 16:17:54 David Miller wrote:
> > From: Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>
> > > i still see people running 2.6.18 kernels today.  usually in server
> > > environments like old RHEL 5 or OpenVZ or Xen instances.
> > 
> > Are they upgrading to current versions of glibc?
> 
> yes.  they control the userland, not the kernel.

While I'd like to bump the requirement, I see this as the best
argument for NOT doing so. There are a lot of environments, especially
cheap OpenVZ-based hosting, where the userland is provided completely
by the customer/user who WANTS to be up-to-date, but who's stuck with
a backwards kernel from their hosting provider.

Do we have a list of things that changed between the current
requirement and 2.6.32 that would allow simplifying or otherwise
improving glibc code if glibc could assume the newer version?

Rich