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  • From: "David Brown" <dmlb2000 AT gmail.com>
  • To: "SM Discuss" <sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] Moving Older Kernel and Glibc
  • Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 13:51:10 -0800

Some Facts:
1) supporting older kernels in the linux spell for some time (older
being 2.[420]), don't know how much use they've gotten used but ledger
says 3 people with 2.4 kernels and no one with 2.2 and 2.0 kernel.

2) glibc 2.4 is the first glibc that only supports 2.6 kernels

3) the 2.6 kernel has a much cleaner install (the linux INSTALL file
can be redused to two lines)

4) most (if not all) kernel module spells don't support 2.4 kernels
and 90% plus kernel development is for the 2.6 kernel anyhow.

Wishes and Hopes:
I'd like to see the older kernel support move out of the linux
spell and we could also split the glibc spell to allow for support for
older kernels. So, we'd have two sets of spells, linux+glibc and
linux-old+glibc23. The default supported set, for iso's and such,
would be the linux 2.6 and glibc 2.4 (when we get it working).

Some other implementations:
Keep the current setup and have some configure questions for
switching between glibc versions 2.3 and 2.4 and don't modify the
linux spell. Which is currently what devel grimoire looks like.

Pros of Keeping Current Setup.
1) Easy to setup cause it's already done.

Cons of Keeping Current Setup.
1) glibc will keep updating, are we going to continue to support glibc
2.5 and 2.3? Even with the difference between 2.3 and 2.4 hostname is
broken for some packages. How much work will it be to maintain
support for both setups? (quite a bit I would imagine).

2) deprecating glibc 2.3 and older kernels (eventually) will be
harder, ripping out code from spells that are made to support multiple
versions is difficult at best.

Pros of Making more spells:
1) deprecating becomes easier, it's very well documented as to
deprecating spells and eventually we will need to deprecate support
for older glibc and kernels

2) the spells themselves become simpler, the linux spell would get
cleaned up a lot and the older linux spell would also be a cleaner
implementation for them.

Cons of Making more spells:
1) Its a little more work in the short run to do this.

Most current distros default support to 2.6 kernels (FC4, ubuntu,
RHEL, gentoo) and don't bother supporting older 2.4 kernels in their
package managers. Only debian and slackware are still using 2.6 as
testing.

- David Brown



  • [SM-Discuss] Moving Older Kernel and Glibc, David Brown, 03/12/2006

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