On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 01:57:12PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
- Greg Kroah-Hartman:
I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.256 kernel.
This, and the 4.4.256 release are a little bit "different" than normal.
This contains only 1 patch, just the version bump from .255 to .256 which ends up causing the userspace-visable LINUX_VERSION_CODE to behave a bit differently than normal due to the "overflow".
With this release, KERNEL_VERSION(4, 9, 256) is the same as KERNEL_VERSION(4, 10, 0).
Nothing in the kernel build itself breaks with this change, but given that this is a userspace visible change, and some crazy tools (like glibc and gcc) have logic that checks the kernel version for different reasons, I wanted to do this release as an "empty" release to ensure that everything still works properly.
I'm looking at this from a glibc perspective. glibc took the KERNEL_VERSION definition and embedded the bit layout into the /etc/ld.so.cache, as part of the file format. Exact impact is still unclear at this point.
If we "cap" this at 4, 9, 255 according to what userspace sees, will that be a problem if we increase the number reported by uname(2)?
And when is the ld.so.cache file "regenerated"?
thanks,
greg k-h