Fwd: Red Hat Linux 9 -- Get it Early

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Mon, 2003-03-24 at 19:15, Jon Hall wrote:

[snip]

> I recently got a blast from Codeweavers (makers of Crossover) which warned
> me not to update to the latest glibc libraries from Red Hat since they would
> break binary compatability with their product.  The patches the Red Hat were
> putting out would have forced an upgrade of glibc from 2.2.93 to 2.3, breaking
> WINE and other things.
> 
> My guess is that Red Hat is upgrading to glibc in V9.0, which might break
> binary compatability in a few things.
> 
> Upgrading to the next major number is a well-known method of signaling
> binary compatability change.  Apparently Red Hat is using that signal.
> 
> Hopefully they will also allow people to link to the older library if needed.

  Unfortunately, this particular change is a bit painful.  It's both a
kernel change and glibc change that will very likely make it very
difficult, if not impossible to run older stuff (older stuff being stuff
specifically affected by this change) on this platform.  It's a
transitional thing that is reminiscent of the COFF -> ELF update where
you *could* wind up with a very broken system.
  I'm not sure of the technical details, but yes Red Hat is aware of the
wine issue and *many* other third party apps that will need to be
updated (including VMware which will be fixed in the next release, if
I'm not mistaken).  It's another one of those updates that is going to
break a lot of things, but app developers better update their apps soon,
because I do believe this new feature is going (already has gone?) into
the 2.5 kernel and/or the mainline glibc.  Come to think of it, two of
the lead developers for glibc, Jakub Jelinek and Ulrich Drepper work for
Red Hat, so technically, it's already *in* the mainline glibc ;-).  I
fully expect that other distributions will follow suite in their next
respective releases.
  See my previous post in this thread about the actual change (NPTL). 
It's supposedly a decent performance boost (but I don't know for what
specific scenarios, or even if it's specific).
-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets