Subject: Re: glibc 2.26 refuses to run on CentOS 6.8

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 07:51:36 -0500

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 01:34:27PM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> The only reason for moving the lower bound to Linux 3.2 is that 2.6 has
> reached EOL.  This allows the glibc developers to assume certain
> kernel features and simplify their code.
> 
> The RHEL kernels are special, though, in that they are continuously
> patched beyond recognition, backporting features.  A RHEL 2.6.32 kernel
> is very different from a stock 2.6.32 kernel.
> 
> The patch explicitly permits a *single* extra kernel version (0x020620 =
> 2.6.32) at runtime, not *all* older kernels, so it isn’t as bad as it
> may seem.

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

> For future updates to the glibc we would have to re-evaluate if the
> current RHEL 6.x kernel still supports all features the glibc expects,
> and decide once more if we can justify patching glibc to allow that one
> particular kernel version.

Yes... and this will probably continue for many years. But I do think we
should do something to work around the issue now, and reevaluate our
solution when the pressure is off.

It would be nice if the graft only applied to x86_64-linux, but I've
never considered if that is easy to do or not.