yeah, i think he (and i, when i have my bionic hat on) have an easier problem than you ... supporting old kernels _usually_ (there are a few exceptions) isn't too hard in the c library because it's generally considered okay to just shrug and return -1 with errno == ENOSYS or whatever.
whereas as an "app", your users expect you to just "do the thing". (which at best tends to mean you have an untested/barely tested "success" case. no-one worries that their return -1 has bitrotted, but the non-inotify path or the non-O_TMPFILE or whatever ... that's a lot more likely!) On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 1:49 PM Rob Landley <r...@landley.net> wrote: > re: https://github.com/landley/toybox/pull/292#issuecomment-899895909 > > I asked Rich Felker on IRC and he said he/musl plans to _never_ drop > support for > any old kernels, and 3.x or newer is plenty. (Didn't ask about compilers or > build environments because you're shipping binaries...) > > Rob > > <landley> dalias: it means support horizon, ala > https://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#support_horizon > <dalias> i think i gathered it's about support for old kernels. musl has no > moving target for that, or if it's moving it only moved further back > <dalias> so yeah, there is no 'support horizon' for musl. kernel versions > >=2.6.0 that work now will continue to work to the extent they do now > <dalias> you need mid to late 2.6.x for full posix functionality; there's > a slim > possibility we may emulate more of that on older kernels in the future, > but we > won't drop any compatibility that's already there > <dalias> making binaries to run on really old devices whose kernels can't > be > upgraded because nobody has the source or there's hacked up vendor > spaghetti > that's impossible to modernize is a major use case for musl > <dalias> we actually have someone who just got musl arm-eabi binaries > running on > a pre-eabi kernel with a few minor hacks to the syscall entry point and > similar > ... > <landley> So you're targeting "2.6 kernel or newer"? > <landley> I dunno how to digest the above into a policy statement. > <landley> Other than cut and paste the whole thing... > <landley> Anyway, if you wanted to reply to the github thread directly, > elliott > would get the ping. > <dalias> ok > <dalias> it's documented as such. 2.6.0 is min version but subject to > functionality limits of the kernel > <dalias> >= 2.6.39 is recommended for full functionality (but actually .29 > or > something is all you need > _______________________________________________ > Toybox mailing list > Toybox@lists.landley.net > http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net >
_______________________________________________ Toybox mailing list Toybox@lists.landley.net http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net