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Re: Remove pre-2.2 Linux kernel support
On Tue, 8 May 2012, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 3:46 PM, Joseph S. Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> > Current glibc is unlikely to work with any Linux kernel before 2.6.x,
> > and it seems uncontroversial that support for kernels before 2.4.x is
> > certainly no longer useful.
> >
> > I propose this patch to remove compatibility code for kernels before
> > 2.2.x as a first step in cleaning up the no-longer-useful old kernel
> > support. ?Tested x86. ?Could the powerpc, sh and sparc maintainers
> > test and review the changes to their architectures' code? ?Because
> > this patch with lots of reindentation may not be very readable, I've
> > also attached a diff -w version.
>
> What testing did you do on x86?
I ran "make check" as usual.
> Is there testsuite coverage for all of the functions touched by this patch?
Maybe not, but that's no different from many other patches.
> Or did you simply ensure that the resulting binaries were identical
> (since you are removing dead code) and that the testsuite passed?
You won't get identical binaries from default builds, because the old
default was --enable-kernel=2.0.10 and the new default is
--enable-kernel=2.2.0. (And a key motivation for such cleanups is to make
the default builds people get without any --enable-kernel option better;
--enable-kernel=2.0.10 is a silly default, and we know from bug 13717 that
glibc doesn't actually work with 2.2 kernels either.)
You won't get identical binaries from --enable-kernel=2.2.0 builds because
of the cases where the code used variables for syscall availability even
in the --enable-kernel=2.2.0 case, but never set them other than to their
default values, and no longer uses such variables after the cleanup.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com