Re: [PATCH 3/4] meson: enforce a minimum Linux kernel headers version >= 4.18

["Alex Bennée" <alex.bennee@linaro.org>]

Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> writes:

> On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 03:38:38PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> On Fri, 21 Oct 2022 at 15:30, Laurent Vivier <laurent@vivier.eu> wrote:
>> >
>> > Le 04/10/2022 à 11:32, Daniel P. Berrangé a écrit :
>> > > Various areas of QEMU have a dependency on Linux kernel header
>> > > definitions. This falls under the scope of our supported platforms
>> > > matrix, but historically we've not checked for a minimum kernel
>> > > headers version. This has made it unclear when we can drop support
>> > > for older kernel headers.
>> > >
>> > >    * Alpine 3.14: 5.10
>> > >    * CentOS 8: 4.18
>> > >    * CentOS 9: 5.14
>> > >    * Debian 10: 4.19
>> > >    * Debian 11: 5.10
>> > >    * Fedora 35: 5.19
>> > >    * Fedora 36: 5.19
>> > >    * OpenSUSE 15.3: 5.3.0
>> > >    * Ubuntu 20.04: 5.4
>> > >    * Ubuntu 22.04: 5.15
>> > >
>> > > The above ignores the 3rd version digit since distros update their
>> > > packages periodically and such updates don't generally affect public
>> > > APIs to the extent that it matters for our build time check.
>> > >
>> > > Overall, we can set the baseline to 4.18 currently.
>> >
>> > As this change affects entire QEMU build, I'd prefer to have some "Acked-by" before merging it via
>> > linux-user branch.
>> 
>> I still think we should be more conservative about kernel header
>> requirements than we are for other dependencies.
>
> How much more though ?  What other distros do we want to target that
> we don't already cover with our targetted platforms  ?

Well purely selfishly the big build box I have access to is still on
18.04 which is currently running 4.15.0-191-generic. It will hopefully
get upgraded before 18.04 goes out of support from Canonical. From a
practical point of view it will be a pain if I can't bisect on it in the
meantime.

>
>
> With regards,
> Daniel


-- 
Alex Bennée