Hi, l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> Dave Love <f...@gnu.org> skribis: > >> Efraim Flashner <efr...@flashner.co.il> writes: >> >>> On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 02:00:35PM +0100, Vincent Legoll wrote: >>>> Hello, >>>> >>>> On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 1:35 PM, Dave Love <f...@gnu.org> wrote: >>>> > Why is linux-libre-headers a long way behind linux-libre (currently at >>>> > version 4.4.47, compared with 4.13.10 for linux-libre)? >>>> >>>> I suspect this is due to massive rebuilding that would occur when >>>> updating linux-libre-headers > > That and also because glibc targets (can target) older kernels, which is > something we rely on. > >>> This is typically updated in the core-updates branch, but it hasn't been >>> updated yet. Based on the LTS versions, we should upgrade it to the 4.9 >>> branch. >> >> Thanks for the explanations. I checked that 4.9 would support the >> Omnipath library, at least. > > The Omnipath library relies on Linux (not libc) headers, and a specific > version thereof? > > I suppose we could also introduce a more recent version of > ‘linux-libre-headers’ specifically for this purpose, with the > understanding that the resulting binaries rely on a specific kernel > version. 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? Mark