| Title | Unclear if lockli is required |
| Status | closed |
| Priority | nice |
| Assigned user | Gareth Rees |
| Organization | Ravenbrook |
| Description | lockli.c is identical to lockix.c, unless OLD_LINUXTHREADS is defined, in which case it calls pthread_mutexattr_setkind_np() instead of pthread_mutexattr_settype(). Is this required on any version of Linux that we support? |
| Analysis | LinuxThreads was used in versions of Linux up to 2.5 [1]. According to [3], the last supported release from this series of versions was 2.4.37.11, released in December 2010, which reached "end of life" at the end of 2011. Version 2.6 (released December 2003) and later versions used the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) [2]. The "supported platforms" section in the README just says: "Linux (Ubuntu 11 and RHEL 6.3 known good, otherwise YMMV)". Ubuntu 11 was not a LTS release but Ubuntu 10 was based on Linux 2.6.32 and Ubuntu 12 was based on 3.2.0 [5] so it was probably between those versions. It looks as if there has never been an Ubuntu release based on Linux 2.4. RHEL 6.3 was based on Linu 2.6.32; the last RHEL release to be based on Linux 2.4 was 3.9 in 2007 [6]. Ubuntu 11 and RHEL 6.3 are no longer known good, by the way—Travis uses Ubuntu 12.04 LTS [4] and locally I use Ubuntu 13.10. |
| How found | inspection |
| Evidence | [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads>[2] < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_POSIX_Thread_Library>[3] < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Maintenance>[4] < http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/ci-environment/>[5] < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases>[6] < https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/3078> |
| Created by | Gareth Rees |
| Created on | 2014-04-17 23:51:41 |
| Last modified by | Gareth Rees |
| Last modified on | 2014-10-10 19:14:12 |
| History | 2014-04-17 GDR Created. |
| Change | Effect | Date | User | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 187044 | closed | 2014-09-26 13:07:49 | Gareth Rees | Microsoft has issued a hotfix for the WOW64 bug; explain this in the overview. Supported platform now described as "Linux 2.4 or later" rather than "Linux (some distros known good)". |
| 186686 | open | 2014-06-19 13:40:35 | Gareth Rees | Update list of "known good" Linux platforms. |