On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, Lyn St George wrote:

> Hallo all
>
> Let me run this up the mast and see how it catches the breeze.
>
> At the moment I have an LFS5.1 system on a 2.4 kernel. I want
> to update this to something akin to LFS6.1 (or HLFS6.1) for reasons
> of security,  but retain the 2.4 kernel for reasons of stability.
>

 I think you really need to define what stability means for you.  There
are a few spacialised places where 2.4 might have merit, and a few
specific drivers that aren't in 2.6 or are apparently troublesome, but
for most desktop and server workloads 2.6 should give much better results.

> Choices seem to be:
> 1/ update (or build again) the 5.1 system with various packages
> updated (OpenSSL, zlib etc etc)
>

 Plausible.  But, updating zlib etc is what you should have already done
;)  And you're already running 2.4.31, I suppose.  In all seriousness,
the base system can be kept reasonably secure by judicious updates
without rebuilding.  The desktop is a different matter - if you use
either gonome or kde, you'll want something a lot more recent.  Those
will *probably* build with a 2.4 kernel, but you may encounter unique
problems which reduce functionality.

 If you really aren't convinced about 2.6, build a "stable" 2.6 kernel
on your existing system (if you want to use modules, don't forget
module-init-tools and 'make moveold' after configuring it).  Then you
can see if it's as bad as you fear.


> 2/ build the 6.1 system but customise for a 2.4 kernel. This would
> involve such things as:
>   a) kernel headers from 2.4
>   b) building glibc for 2.4
>   c) udev omitted
>   d) NPTL may need tweaking
>   e) others to be found ...
>
> Obviously both choices break the books. The first choice ought to be
> less problematic, but the second should be better if it were to prove
> successful.

 Glibc, and indeed the kernel headers, is pretty much untested in this
context.  NPTL won't work at all on a non-RedHat system.  iproute2 will
probably not work, therefore bootscripts and networking can't be done
using the book's versions.  Much pain can be expected.  At the end of
the day, if you want an LFS system with a 2.4 kernel, 5.1 with upgrades
is as good as it gets.

Ken
-- 
 das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce

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