Filepro 4.8 and Linux kernel 2.6

[Fairlight]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 10:38:20AM -0400, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Jay Ashworth cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 10:15:11AM -0400, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> > Quoting Cal Robinson (Fri, 08 Apr 2005 09:40:40 -0400):
> > > I'm currently running FilePro 4.8 on Redhat 8. At this time I cannot
> > > upgrade Filepro. I am interested in switching to fedora core 3,
> > > which runs a 2.6 kernel. On my test machine I get as far as user
> > > menus and then nothing. My screen flickers and thats it.
> > >
> > > Is it possible to run 4.8 with the linux 2.6 kernel?

No.  It is technically impossible.

> > I know that when RedHat 9 came out, they had made some change that
> > made it incompatible with some older binaries, including filePro. I do
> > not know if that change was something RH-specific, or kernel-related.
> > It may be that Fedora Core 3 has the same incompatibility.
> 
> I had this problem with a 5.0 release on 2.6.  If I remember correctly
> what Mark said, it's to do with static vs dynamic library linking, and
> no, it's unlikely that you'll get 4.8 to run on 2.6, absent possibly
> major library wrangling the details of which I do not know.

They made changes for 2.6 to include NPTL.  They also changed the API and
ABI for the kernel, and part of this changed how a few things worked.  One
of these ended up farming out work to nsswitch functions, which are in a
library that gets sucked in by virtue of how "static" libraries work under
glibc.  

It's all a bit complicated, but my understanding of it from what I read in
an article a while back is that most of this is glibc's fault, although
it only became a problem after 2.6 started (and in some 2.4's such as RH
9, which back-ported 2.6 features into a late 2.4, at least originally).
There are some vendor-mangled kernels that claim to be 2.4 that actually
trigger the same issue.

Anyway, the first fP version that I know of that works under these terms is
5.0.10.  The prerequisite is that you make sure libtermcap is installed.
There are no exceptions, and there is no workaround.  If you must stick
with filePro 4.8, you can not run 2.6 (or vendor-mangled late 2.4) kernels
and the later glibc's.

mark->
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