On Mon Oct 25 1999 at 10:12, "Michael H. Warfield" wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 25, 1999 at 08:54:50AM -0500, Neal J. Gieselman wrote:
> > Hello,
> > Does anyone know if there exists a binary incompatibility
> > between Redhat 6.0 and 6.1? This includes both applications
> > and libraries in both directions.
>
> Yeah...
>
> You're not going to be able to run binaries compiled
> specifically for RedHat 6.1 on earlier systems because 6.1 is based
> on glibc 2.1 while 6.0 was glibc 2.0 (libc 6) and 5.2 was libc 5.
Your memory doesn't serve you very well... you got it all wrong.
Redhat 6.0 uses glibc 2.1, redhat 5.x uses glibc 2.0, redhat 4.x used
libc5 ("elf"), redhat 3.x used a.out.
All redhat 6.x binaries will run on redhat 6.x installations.
All redhat 5.x binaries will run on redhat 5.x installations.
All redhat 4.x binaries will run on redhat 4.x installations.
All redhat 3.x binaries will run on redhat 3.x installations.
Do I detect some sort of pattern emerging here? :)
Additionally, most binaries from old distributions will run on more
recent installations if the appropriate runtime libraries are
installed.
Actually, there are some other wrinkles to all this. For example, the
C++ compiler got upgraded from rh 5.0 to rh5.1 from g++ to egc-c++
along with the stdc++ libraries. But the big changes follow the major
number of the distribution versions.
> Binaries on previous versions should work just fine on later
> versions subject to kernel changes and interface changes. I've even
No, that's not quite right either. Sure, the kernel needs to have the
support available (compiled in or as modules), but as I said above,
they'll only run if the legacy run-time libraries are installed onto
later distributions to allow then to run.
Using the legacy runtime libraries is something that in general that I
wouldn't encourage peopleto do. For one thing, it's memory
consuming... you end up needed to have two sets of runtime libraries
loaded into memory on mixed systems. Not good for performance, and
starts to waste system resources.
> got an old a.out (RedHat 3.x) binary running on a RedHat 6.0 system
> (don't ask why - it's a long story) although I had to track
> down the compatibility libraries and install them.
The a.out compatability libraries were (and still are) included in the
redhat powertools collection.
As I say, try to avoid installing them - although it seems that in
this case you have a reason to do so. (No access to the sources to
recompile an old binary you still need to use?)
Cheers
Tony
