Re: 2.4 Kernel

[Andreas Jochens <aj@andaco.de>]

On 04-Oct-10 07:14, Julian Scheid wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm stuck with 2.4 for the time being: for one of my cards there's no 
> 2.6-compatible driver available.

Which driver is that? The best would be to get it ported to 2.6 because
2.4 does not support amd64 very well. I think upstream does not backport
any amd64 related changes to 2.4 anymore and this could lead to 
problems because there have been quite a few fixes for amd64 in the 
latest 2.6 kernels.

> I tried to boot Debian/AMD64 with a custom 2.4 kernel (compiled from 
> kernel-source-2.4.27) but when it gets to userland initialization I see 
> the message "FATAL: Kernel too old" and it just hangs there.

This is because the amd64 glibc exclusively uses nptl which does not 
work with kernel 2.4 AFAIK.

> I googled for a solution and it looks like the problem is that 
> Debian/AMD64's default glibc is compiled for a 2.6 kernel. But I didn't 
> manage to find out how to install an alternate glibc, or whether such an 
> alternative exists at all. Since the 2.4 tree is included in the 
> repository, I guess it does exist?

You could replace nptl with linuxthreads in debian/sysdeps/amd64.mk
and switch off the kernel version test (I don't know exactly how to 
switch that test off).

Regards
Andreas Jochens