[OpenAFS-devel] Re: [OpenAFS] How old of Linux do you use with OpenAFS?

[Richard Brittain]

A few RHEL7 in production; random Fedoras, generally newer.
Lots of RHEL6/Centos6
A handful of RHEL5, currently at 2.6.18-409.el5.x86_64
One RHEL4 32-bit 2.6.9-103.ELsmp which I should get rid of.

A handful of Ubuntu 10, currently at 2.6.32-74, but more Ubuntu 12.x or 
14.x

We've not made a new 32-bit Linux build in years.

  Richard

On Fri, 6 May 2016, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> OpenAFS has generally tried to provide a software that is compatible with
> a wide range of new and historical operating systems; it is only recently
> (March 2015) that we removed support for Linux 2.4.
>
> The current linux support is all bundled in as "Linux 2.6", since there
> has not been a major version boundary with drastic changes since then,
> rather, a continual evolution with some changes affecting us in most
> releases.  Major versions 3 and 4 were added just because "the numbers
> were getting too big", but are still a normal evolution of the code with
> ancestry from 2.6.
>
> Because there are not major version conditionals in place (and because
> many distributions backport some patches for their kernels but not
> others), we instead rely on feature tests at configure time.  Over time,
> we accumulate a lot of these tests and the corresponding code
> conditionals, which makes the code harder to read and maintain.
>
> I would like to get a sense for what versions of Linux are in use with
> OpenAFS today, to give some guidance as to whether it may be appropriate
> to increase the minimum supported version of Linux from 2.6.0.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ben

Richard Brittain,  Research Computing Group,
                    IT Services, 37 Dewey Field Road, HB6219
                    Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755
Richard.Brittain@dartmouth.edu 603-646-2085