[Nix-dev] end-of-life kernels

[Mathijs Kwik]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Eelco Dolstra
<eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 19/11/12 15:28, Lluís Batlle i Rossell wrote:
>
>>>> But I imagine Eelco wants glibc to be built for 3.5 kernels or above.
>>>
>>> Stdenv has "--enable-kernel=2.6.35".
>>
>> Do you favour a higher value?
>
> Is there a good reason for a higher value?  Certainly it can't be higher than
> 3.2 since that's our default kernel.  And of course people may well want to run
> Nixpkgs on Linux distributions that have much older kernels.

I propose introducing additional glibc-26compat and headers-26compat
packages for these older kernels.
I understand the effect of using those is recompiling most from
scratch, but as I've already mentioned, I suspect the use cases for
these older kernels to be mostly related to small/targeted systems or
quick vm-test-runs on a bunch of kernels, not entire desktops/servers.
Also, these systems probably won't need weekly update cycles, so these
compiles are limited.
We should not let those cases influence the defaults too much.

I'd say on every stdenv-merge, we upgrade --enable-kernel and the
default headers to the version of the previous default kernel (that
would be 3.2 next time). This way, people can keep on running with the
previous default for some time after a merge.

For anyone wanting to use an older kernel, they can switch their
glibc/headers to the 2.6-compat versions (probably 2.6.32) and do some
more compiling themselves. Perhaps hydra can do some minimal profile
(CLI and base system only) for the compat builds.



>
> --
> Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/
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