[Gllug] Glibc

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 09:58:22AM +0100, John Edwards wrote:
> I think he means Red Hat ENTERPRISE Linux. Still RHEL version 4 is
> about 5 years old and must be coming near the end of it's life as well.

RHEL 4 EOL will be Feb 29, 2012, for most customers.  I'm told you can
bung wads of $$$ under the table and get longer support.  Or get
someone else to support it -- it is open source after all.

> Running the old Red Hat Linux 4 on any newish machine would be an
> achievement, as I doubt that the 2.0 kernel would support all the
> new hardware (eg SATA, Gigabit ethernet).

Dan Berrange wrote:
> That's what virtualization is for :-) Keeping your old OS running
> forever and ever and ever and ever and ever...

Old RHL doesn't even run under virtualization.  I tried to install RHL 6.2
under KVM a while back and it didn't work.

The surface between the kernel and the hardware is surprisingly
complex and brittle, and most of the testing in virtualization goes
towards making sure very specific versions of specific Linux and
Windows kernels work.  Even current versions of non-Linux non-Windows
can be spectacularly broken: I know that PC-BSD, Dragonfly BSD,
NetBSD, OpenBSD, Minix, AIX 6, Solaris 10 and very old Linux do *not*
work in KVM at the moment, and moreover no one cares.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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