On Mon, Nov 06, 2017 at 03:44:41AM -0500, Mark H Weaver wrote: > Are you sure about this? My impression was that binaries compiled with > newer linux-libre-headers can be run on older kernels. If you were > correct, then the binaries we've been building throughout 2017 could be > reliably run only on linux-libre-4.4 or newer. > > In fact, we've been successfully running these Guix binaries on > hydra.gnu.org with its old 2.6.x kernel, and on build slaves running > kernels older than 4.4. Furthermore, I strongly suspect that many of > our users (e.g. Trisquel users) have been running Guix on older kernels > as well, and yet I don't recall seeing any bug reports related to this. > > My recommendation would be to update linux-libre-headers to the latest > LTS kernel (currently 4.9.x) in every core-updates cycle. > > What do you think?
The Linux kernel API is remarkably stable. It is indeed the reason we *can* run GNU Guix on older kernels in the first place - the kernel is our single dependency. The headers do change, but mostly due to kernel internals which are not used from glibc etc. I remember for Nix there was a breaking kernel API change at some point. But it is extremely rare. Must have been 10 years ago. Pj. --
