Will it be possible to use a new kernel on 15 year old Linux distro?
Probably it cannot be compiled with 15 year old compiler and it is doubtful the newest compilers will work on top of a 15 year old distro.
But what if I just put it in a readily compiled kernel boot it up and see what happens?
It might work but I'd be surprised
Linux has no backwards compatibility, unlike Windows. If you want to work with 25+ year old software, Windows is the way to go.
Expect userland breakage. Linus generally tries to avoid it but there's definitely been some changes in the past 15 years that won't work well with a 15 year old userland.
Do try it and see what happens.
but what if its 10+ year old Linux software with no Windows versions?
It depends if the subset of necessary functionality to run their specific old hardware is still in the kernel. You can generally run Linux on old hardware without an issue.
yeah usually even new Linux kernel work allright in old hardware but things like 486 are no longer supported, pentiums are minimum
but however what is more rare thing would be to put a recent kernel into a very old linux distro runnin on top of old hardware and the effect of new kernel cannot be predicted
You could land an F-15 on that forehead haha
This is incorrect, linux runs old software much better than windows does.
Because you can recompile it. The old binaries won't work.
Possible, I think.
Maybe there would be some trouble on sysfs/udev-devtmpfs wise.
big forehead = big brain
> Will it be possible to use a new kernel on 15 year old Linux distro?
Yes. See: LXC and CentOS 5 template, available at least in Proxmox. It's a bizzare feel to do uname -a and see something like "4.15", but it works.
linux makes no effort to support old kernel modules, but it absolutely does support old userland binaries
pic related, in a similar thread, i found and ran a nearly 15 year old ut2004 demo for linux, it required only an older version of libstdc++ and also the use of padsp for sound, that's all.
there's also no reason why you can't run old distros with new kernels, though i haven't played with this personally
Not a thinly veiled cun cun thread? I am disappoint.
i'm playing around with putting a modern 5.2.9 64bit kernel in a debian 3.0 (2002) rootfs, which originally has linux 2.2
it's not exactly drop-in, immediately it complains it can't fsck /dev/hda1 .. yea, this is before everything switched over to using /dev/sd* instead
of course binaries will /run/, but that's not the only thing that is required
well, it does boot up just changing fstab to say "/dev/sda1" instead
pic related because she's 15?
practically, it makes more sense to run software from a chroot if you need to (pic related)
yes, these are positively ancient /binaries/, not recompiled, running directly on my 5.2.9 host
$ ls -lah /usr/bin/gimp-1.2 /usr/bin/mozilla-1.0.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2.2M Apr 10 2002 /usr/bin/gimp-1.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5.7k Jun 24 2002 /usr/bin/mozilla-1.0.0
nearly none of the default mozilla bookmarks work anymore
most of them either;
- give a certificate error
- can't negotiate a common encryption algorithm (https)
- don't exist anymore
and half the ones that still work are websites which aren't actively updated anymore
you can't even run software from distros two years apart without trouble shooting.
Linux is the ultimate botnet, repo slavery is designed update the bot net feature and it's not like anyone takes time to read the source code.
how the fuck are you doing that? sorcery?
If you configured the kernel right, then probably. Linux has a policy of not breaking userspace.
ut2004 is just run directly, no chroot or anything
the other two are being run from a chroot of debian 3.0, it's not that hard to run graphical programs from a chroot
linux has excellent compatibility with userspace binaries, to the point you can even boot an entire distro using a much newer kernel ()
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