Re: [vserver] Stable Linux-VServer Release

From: Herbert Poetzl <herbert_at_13thfloor.at>
Date: Thu 28 Jul 2011 - 18:16:50 BST
Message-ID: <20110728171650.GJ8716@MAIL.13thfloor.at>

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 06:07:44PM +0100, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:48:36 +0200, Herbert Poetzl
> <herbert@13thfloor.at> wrote:

>> of course, nobody really knows and I don't know what
>> distributions will do, but I guess that nobody wants to
>> stick with a 2.6 kernel now that 3.0 is out, at least all
>> the major distros will feature and support 3.x in some
>> way ...

> Of course they will, but I don't see RHEL6 jumping from 2.6.32
> to 3.x during it's production life, and RHEL7 isn't due for
> at least another couple of years, possibly longer. Either
> way, whether they will shift the distro kernel is largely
> irrelevant. What IS important in this case is whether 3.0
> will work on the current stable distro with at most minimal
> userspace changes. As I said before, if current stable distros
> will work fine with a vanilla 3.0.x kernel, then I would
> completely support that, but that is something that needs to be
> assessed.

I'd be really surprised if RHEL or any other distro would
not work with a mainline 3.x kernel with a few changes or
updates regarding initramfs ...

for userspace we know that everything is fine, otherwise
nobody could run an older distro as guest system, which
works nicely as we all know (i.e. userspace can work quite
well with recent kernels)

the boot process, especially module loading and udev are
probably the main concern, considering that some older
kernels had no need/support for udev and/or required some
kind of special handling, but all that can be taken care
in a modern initramfs (see devtmpfs for details)

you might not be able to use all new kernel features with
an old userspace on the host, but that's not really
relevant for Linux-VServer either, because recent enough
util-vserver will do everything you need to get the guests
up and running, regardless of the surrounding userspace

so, if somebody creates a RHEL or whatever kvm image to
experiment with, I've no problem to build an initramfs to
boot into 3.0 for that just to prove that it can be done

best,
Herbert

> Gordan
Received on Thu Jul 28 18:17:00 2011

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