Question

I build an application on a machine running Linux (Debian) with kernel 2.6.26-2-amd64 and I want to run this application on another machine running Linux (Suse) with kernel 2.6.16.60-0.21-smp but I get the error “FATAL: kernel too old”.

I know from research on the internet that this can happen when building against a glibc library that was not compiled to support older kernel versions, but it usually concerns version 2.4. Is it possible to get such errors for kernel of the same series (2.6) or can this be from something else ?

Additionally I read that the solution to this problem is to rebuild the application against another version of glibc compiled with appropriate –enable-kernel=VERSION option. As an alternative can you just dynamically link your application with glibc to solve the problem ?

Thank you for your help.

UPDATE: I understand my question may seem vague or solved by one of the solutions already mentionned (dynamically linking, building on another [virtual] system, rebuilding glibc [which seems quite tricky considering the comments I read about it]) but what I am ultimately looking for are ways to prevent such problems.

For instance, is it possible to find which versions of the Linux kernel are compatible with a particular build of glibc ?

UPDATE 2: I eventually found a source patch for glibc (for Debian but I guess there are similar docs online for other distros) that (I guess) contains the information I was looking for.

From this page:

--- eglibc-2.11.2.orig/debian/sysdeps/linux.mk
+++ eglibc-2.11.2/debian/sysdeps/linux.mk
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
[...]
+MIN_KERNEL_SUPPORTED := 2.6.18
[...]
+# Minimum Kernel supported
+with_headers = --with-headers=$(shell pwd)/debian/include
--enable-kernel=$(call xx,MIN_KERNEL_SUPPORTED)
[...]

Which explains the “kernel too old” error. Hope it helps other people.

Answer 1

One way you can determine the minimum kernel version for a given ELF file is to run file on it, like so:

$ echo 'int main(){}' > test.c
$ gcc -o test test.c
$ file test
test: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.38, not stripped

The important part here is the “for GNU/Linux 2.6.38“, which indicates the minimum kernel version.