On 19 January 2018 at 16:04, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 12:27 PM, Victor Stinner > <victor.stin...@gmail.com> wrote: >> CPython still has compatibility code for Linux 2.6, whereas the >> support of Linux 2.6.x ended in August 2011, longer than 6 years ago. >> Should we also drop support for old Linux kernels? If yes, which ones? >> The Linux kernel has LTS version, the oldest is Linux 3.2 (support >> will end in May, 2018). >> >> Linux kernel support: >> >> https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html > > RHEL 5 uses 2.6.28, and still has "extended life cycle support" until > 2020, but I guess no-one should be running Python 3.7 on that. CentOS > 6 and RHEL 6 use 2.6.32, and their EOL is also 2020 (or 2024 for RHEL > 6 with extended life cycle support). Redhat does ship and support 3.6 > on CentOS/RHEL 6 through their "software collections" product, and > presumably is planning to do the same for 3.7. > > It is a little surprising to see a Redhat employee suggest dropping > support for RHEL 6. Hopefully you know what you're doing :-)
Red Hat's kernel version numbers describe the *oldest* code in that kernel, rather than the newest. So if Red Hat customers want to run a new version of CPython on an older version of RHEL, and the new version of CPython needs a particular kernel feature, then that turns into a backport request for that kernel capability (e.g. while there were multiple drivers for Red Hat backporting the getrandom() syscall the RHEL 7's 3.10 kernel, CPython was one of them: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1330000) So I think it makes sense to base python-dev's Linux kernel support policy on the community LTS streams for the Linux kernel - if a commercial Python vendor chooses to go beyond those dates they can, just as they may go beyond python-dev's nominal support dates for CPython itself. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
