Bill Glidden wrote:
> Hi –
>
> Are there any gotchas or issues if I take an app that was built on a
> 2.4 kernel, and run it on a 2.6 kernel?
>
> I’m bringing a bunch of libraries that were also built on 2.4, such as
> QT, mysql, and a few others.
>
> Everything seems to be working fine in this scenario, but I don’t want
> to find out the hard way that this wasn’t a good idea.
>
Only a subset of userspace tools care about kernel specific services and
drivers.
From your application's perspective, it really only cares about
userspace, which is generally the same between kernels.
Some things are added to the environment or changed over time as the
kernel evolves.
The primary concern of your application binaries are architecture (i386,
x86_64, etc), and libraries (glibc 2.3, etc) that they are built and
linked against, as well as filesystem layout (which is generally LSB now).
If you "upgrade" to a 2.6 kernel, the primary changes you will see are
to do with modules (modutils is replaced by module-init-tools) and
potential /dev/ management (devfs is gone as of 2.6.13, replaced by
udev), etc.
When I generate metapackages to deploy here at NKS, I bundle anything
tied to the specific kernel version alongside the kernel itself. Every
kernel has a required set of userspace tools that should match the
kernel version to behave properly. As long as you meet these
requirements, you should generally be fine. Here's a short subset of
things I see when I look in my latest kernel packages:
alsa-base, alsa-utils, aoetools, binutils, bridge-utils, dhcp3, dmsetup,
drbd, e2fsprogs, fuse-utils, gnbd, grub, initrd-tools,
iproute, iptables, ipvsadm, lvm2, mdadm, module-init-tools, mii-diag,
pciutils, procps, smartmontools, sysfsutils, uml-utilities, vlan,
wireless-tools, xfsprogs
And so on. Things that are tied to the kernel to do their job are things
I bundle with my kernels so they always match the latest kernel version.
My other "application" metapackages are really only concerned with the
version of libraries installed and the architecture they are deploying
under.
This approach works well for us. YMMV.
- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>
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