Gentoo Archives: gentoo-alt

From: Benda Xu <heroxbd@g.o>
To: gentoo-alt@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-alt] Profile names for legacy systems?
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2017 11:45:29
Message-Id: 87tvxdl35e.fsf@gentoo.org
1 Hi Friends,
2
3 Now a Prefix on amd64 GNU/Linux has 3 profiles:
4
5 ,----
6 | $ eselect profile list
7 | Available profile symlink targets:
8 | [1] prefix/linux/amd64
9 | [2] prefix/linux-standalone/amd64 *
10 | [3] prefix/linux-standalone/amd64/legacy
11 `----
12
13 The [1] is the traditional rpath, the [2] is for RAP and the [3] is for
14 RAP on systems with linux kernel <2.6.32.
15
16 Things become more complicated when sys-libs/glibc-2.26 requires
17 >=linux-3.2.0 on all the architectures[a]. That means we will have 2
18 legacy profiles, one for <linux-2.6.32 and another for >=linux-2.6.32
19 and <linux-3.2.0.
20
21 In academia and supercomputing centers, OS upgrades are rather
22 conservative. I still see OS with linux-2.6.9 (RHEL 4) serving critical
23 tasks in the wild. That said, we are still able to support these legacy
24 systems. The question is what profile name scheme should be used?
25
26 My baseline proposal is like this:
27
28 - prefix/linux-standalone/amd64: the newest profiles
29
30 - prefix/linux-standalone/amd64/before_3.2.0: <linux-3.2.0
31
32 mask >=glibc-2.26 for x86 and amd64, >=glibc-2.24 for all others
33
34 - prefix/linux-standalone/amd64/before_2.6.32: <linux-2.6.32
35
36 same as "prefix/linux-standalone/amd64/legacy".
37
38
39 Whenever glibc bumps its minimal kernel requirement, a news item should
40 be pushed out to tell users to consider switching to the legacy
41 profiles.
42
43 What do you think? Is there a better profile name than before_3.2.0?
44
45 Cheers,
46 Benda
47
48 a. https://bugs.gentoo.org/639152