Linux kernel version support policy

[Allan McRae]

On 29/01/14 12:10, Rich Felker wrote:
> 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.
> 

This is an issue I had when I set the minimum kernel version to 2.6.32
in the Arch Linux glibc build.  A lot of OpenVZ users were unhappy and I
believe an unofficial repository was set up to maintain a parallel glibc
package with 2.6.18 support.

Anyway, lets look at what various Linux distributions do with
--enable-kernel:

Arch Linux: 2.6.32
Debian: 2.6.32
Fedora: 2.6.32
Gentoo: not sure - seems to be user configurable?
openSUSE: 2.6.32 for x86_64, 2.6.16 otherwise
Ubuntu: 2.6.32 or 2.6.24 depending on architecture

So...  2.6.32 probably is not too controversial.

Allan