glibc-2.3.90-26 and older kernels

Ulrich Drepper drepper at redhat.com
Fri Jan 6 20:13:54 UTC 2006


David Hollis wrote:
> It'll hit somebody who feels the need to keep that old 2.0.30 kernel
> running or something....

Well, that person has long been out of luck since we already required a
minimum 2.4.20 kernel.

Beside, glibc is really conservative as far as the kernel requirement
goes.  Other components closely tied to the kernel (like kudzu) require
much more recent kernels.  So, you cannot really run such old kernels
unless you jump through hoops.

How you can possibly arrive at the conclusion that Red Hat is "slave to
the almighty dollar" I cannot fathom.  This is an optimization which
reduces the penalties people using the Fedora as it is have to pay.  In
addition it reduces the burden to support bugs in code on old systems,
thereby improving the quality for the modern code.


> Out of curiosity though, how much compatibility cruft has built up over
> all this time?  Is it a size issue?  Maintenance?  Performance even?

Sufficiently.  About 1k of code, all from hot paths.  Some variables,
tested in that code, are also gone.

-- 
➧ Ulrich Drepper ➧ Red Hat, Inc. ➧ 444 Castro St ➧ Mountain View, CA ❖

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