> I've looked at the kernel packages we have in /usr/portage, but have no > guide there either. If I go by gentoo-sources, I could get rid of all > but very recent versions of udev, but I have heard some things also > about people using older kernels. Also, vanilla-sources goes all the way > back to 2.6.16 (I have no idea why)? >
I think, at the very least, we want to support kernel 2.6.32 or later via whatever methods are required in Gentoo to allow those existing systems to keep running and recompile as needed. 2.6.32 is used by a number of mainstream distributions as a long term stable release. And, cautious admins migrating to Gentoo or supporting the same apps on multiple distributions may want to continue to stick with that kernel release for awhile. I'm also aware that 2.6.36 was widely deployed for gentoo servers around here, although some of those systems have started to migrate to 3.2. I'm not sure how much of a need there would be for anything older than 2.6.32. 2.6.32 would seem to be a reasonable cutoff. As for udev specifically, 171 is what is deployed on most boxes here to avoid any possible need for an initrd or other possible bugs with newer releases... Reading the udev-171 ebuild, it appears it supports >2.6.16 so I'm not sure if there is any need for udev versions earlier than 171.
