Nice to know that the 4.1 kernel has been selected as long term for 2 years of support.

Hi,

Yep, it's gonna be supported till the next Slackware release (after 14.2)

--
Best regards,
Andrzej Telszewski

I know you're joking. But the reason it's good news, in case anybody was wondering, is that the kernel people feel that the kernel deserves LTS (long term support) because they think it is stable and there were no significant problems that showed up during the cycle.

Hi,

Naturally I'm joking I hope 14.2 arrives exactly on Christmas (this or next year), I don't want socks again

BTW, it was said somewhere, some time ago, that 4.1.x is most probably going to be LTS.
So no big surprise for me here. But still, rather nice surprise.

--
Best regards,
Andrzej Telszewski

They have changed their minds in the past. They changed even how they announce the LT kernels. They used to decide earlier and then people started to rush to get everything crammed in before the window closed. Now they are more careful.

Hi,

Up to the point that Linus would sometimes close the window one day before without a notice

I'm happily running 4.1.x on 14.1 and 14.0 for quite some time now.
Everything seems to be working just fine.

--
Best regards,
Andrzej Telszewski

I don't mind which kernel a release ships with, so long as the installed kernel headers -- which glibc is built against -- are no newer than the latest LTS. That at least allows a Slacker to downgrade their kernel safely if they find it necessary to do so: new headers / old kernel is asking for trouble.


P.S.

12.2 coincided with a LTS kernel, and IMO that was one of the 'Golden' ones!

Sorry if this is too newbie a question... Other than compiling the kernel yourself, where are you getting an official Slackware build of the 4.1 kernel? I'm running 3.10.17. Is it necessary to upgrade? Thanks!

Hi,

@jennings If you're fine with what you have you don't need to upgrade.

--
Best regards,
Andrzej Telszewski

-current is running 4.1.6 right now.

Okay, should have figured that. No problems at all ... now running Slackware 14.1 on 3 machines. All are 2008 or earlier.

Whether it's "necessary" or not is very much in the eye of the beholder. I recently built myself a 3.10.89 after doing a fresh install of 14.1 and not being comfortable with the age of the stock kernel. Two years worth of kernel fixes seem worth having to me.

The better reason to upgrade your kernel might be new hardware support.

Slackware doesn't tightly restrict the kernel that glibc can support (I generally do when I compile glibc because I don't need it to support anything older than the oldest "rescue disk" kernel I might intend to boot with using root=), he'd be more likely to make it something like --enable-kernel=2.6.0. I can't remember exactly what the last one I looked at was, but I do remember that it's always plenty backwards compatible.

P.S. I just looked at .glibc.Slackbuild in current -current, and it's --enable-kernel=2.6.32 (which seems more restrictive than in the past but still plenty flexible enough)

Yep, glibc contains the compatibility code to allow it to run ok on older kernels, but my feeling is that this will only work when glibc is newer than the kernel headers it was built against: otherwise, how would it know what adjustments are necessary to make in the compatibility layer?

Besides, there are software components other than glibc that may use kernel headers so I'm still inclined to think that as a general rule: new headers/old kernel is best avoided.