[Joe Orton] > OK nice. Why does this require run-time detection rather than simply > a smarter configure test (or apr_hints.m4 blacklist or whatever)?
Because we (Debian) ship binaries rather than source code. Our users run these binaries on both kernel 2.4 and kernel 2.6. Without runtime detection you get two bad choices. Take your pick: - Users still on kernel 2.4 can't run Apache at all - or - Users on kernel 2.6 can't use Apache to serve 2+GB files Runtime detection allows everyone to run Apache, and the majority (people using kernel 2.6, or kernel 2.4.21+ on i386) can also serve large files. ...And before you say "just make all Debian users upgrade their kernels", that's not realistic. Datacenters that sell shell accounts on vservers, for example, often let you control the whole system _except_ what kernel it runs. Btw, use of the Linux epoll facility is similar (another kernel 2.4/2.6 difference), except that if you unconditionally disable it, no actual functionality is lost, only a bit of efficiency. So we disabled epoll.
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