Requiring Linux 3.2 for glibc 2.24

[Joseph Myers]

On Tue, 9 Feb 2016, Aurelien Jarno wrote:

> On 2016-01-31 16:22, Joseph Myers wrote:
> > As Linux 2.6.32 has been announced to reach end-of-line next month 
> > <https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/1/29/647>, I propose that for glibc 2.24 we 
> > require Linux 3.2 as the minimum kernel version when glibc is used on 
> > systems with the Linux kernel and there isn't already a more recent 
> > architecture-specific minimum.  This would continue to be the minimum 
> > until 3.2 reaches EOL (currently listed as May 2018 at 
> > <https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html>).  3.2 would thus also be 
> > the minimum headers version as well as the minimum version at runtime.
> 
> I am in favor of that. That said when have we tried to do so in Debian
> stretch/sid (which will be released in 2017), people started to complain
> loudly that it breaks openvz. We had to revert the change given a lot of
> VPS providers are using openvz.

Was there any controversy for architectures other than x86 / x86_64?  
While I'm not convinced it's sensible to try to support late-2016 
distributions running on kernel series dating from 2009, as I said in 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2016-02/msg00031.html>, changing the 
minimum for other architectures does allow a fair number of the cleanups, 
although not all of them.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com