Doing away with CentOS 6 support (Linux faux-2.6)?

Doing away with CentOS 6 support (Linux faux-2.6)?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guix!

We’ve been carrying a libc patch that allows us to potentially run
binaries on systems running the CentOS 6 kernel—a heavily-patched Linux
2.6 that resembles 3.0 but identifies itself as 2.6.32.

  https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/patches/glibc-allow-kernel-2.6.32.patch

Back in 2018, this was deemed important for HPC clusters, where CentOS 6
was then relatively common, as Ricardo explained:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-02/msg00392.html

Five years later, it seems reasonable to drop the patch (which is likely
untested these days).  If you disagree, now’s the time to make your
voice heard!

With the upcoming glibc upgrade in the ‘core-updates’ branch¹, glibc
would require Linux >= 3.2.0, as is already the case on ‘master’ if we
omit this faux-2.6.32 exception.

It’s still weeks, or perhaps months, before ‘core-updates’ is merged,
but the sooner we discuss this, the better!

Ludo’.

¹ https://issues.guix.gnu.org/67686

Re: Doing away with CentOS 6 support (Linux faux-2.6)?

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Thu, 07 Dec 2023 at 23:46, Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> wrote:

> Back in 2018, this was deemed important for HPC clusters, where CentOS 6
> was then relatively common, as Ricardo explained:

Héhé!  A colleague re-installed CentOS 6 this week; for testing
purpose.  Hum… :-)

> Five years later, it seems reasonable to drop the patch (which is likely
> untested these days).  If you disagree, now’s the time to make your
> voice heard!

Yeah, let drop this patch.  Well, CentOS 7 will be soon end of life so
it seems very reasonable to drop patches for CentOS 6 only.

Cheers,
simon