Re: [gentoo-dev] glibc 2.16/19 for Gentoo Prefix on antique kernels

[William Hubbs]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 10:10:26AM +0100, Michał Górny wrote:
> W dniu nie, 25.02.2018 o godzinie 15∶17 +0900, użytkownik Benda Xu
> napisał:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Yes, it's 2018.  But there are still RHEL 4 and 5 systems running
> > antique kernels such as 2.6.8 and 2.6.18.  In my experience, many of
> > them are data acquisition hubs or computing clusters.  No administrator
> > cares about security as long as they "work".
> >
> > Under the form "Prefix", Gentoo is set out to rescue users trapped in
> > these abandoned wastelands of antiques.  After years of work, we have
> > achieved that goal, except one minor thing: glibc periodically drop
> > support for old linux kernels, the lastest glibc supporting linux 2.6.8
> > is 2.16 and for linux-2.6.18 it is glibc-2.19.
> >
> > With the recent reunion of the Toolchain Project, old glibc versions are
> > masked and removed, accelerating the adoption of new versions.  This
> > opens a new oppotunity for the Prefix: people stops caring about
> > unsupported glibc versions, the Prefix Project can take them over
> > without worrying about breaking other peoples' machines.
> >
> > Now, profiles/default/linux/amd64/17.0/no-multilib/prefix/kernel-2.6.16+
> > unmasks <glibc-2.18. Some pathes needs to be backported, like the
> > /lib/gentoo/functions.sh transition.  prefix/kernel-2.6+ with glibc-2.16
> > is also planned.  In addition, glibc have to be patched to get python3
> > built[1-3], which is urgent once portage drops python2[4].
> >
> >
> > So I would like to hear what you guys think if I:
> >
> >   - keep glibc-2.19 and glibc-2.16 in tree and unmasking them in the
> >     selected Prefix profiles;
> >
> >   - maintain those selected outdated glibc versions on the
> >     infrastructure of the Toolchain Project[5];
> >
> >   - (optional) add an exception to the toolchain support policy[6].
>
>
> How about moving them to an overlay?

I am with mgorny on this, this sort of specialized support does not
belong in the main tree.

The kernel versions you are talking about aren't even supported by the
upstream kernel folks any more -- the oldest lts version is 3.2.99.

Thanks,

William