4 ms·
The kernel has never used semver, and it doesn't have to because it never breaks userspace.
by CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
The kernel has never used semver, and it doesn't have to because it never breaks userspace.
- szastamasta 4y agoWasn’t it that version 2.xx was introduced due to incompatible changes? At least it’s what i remember.
- broodbucket 4y agoDunno, but 2.x was ~20 years ago, things are different now
- szastamasta 4y agoSorry, it looks I’m a bit old :P
- jlokier 4y ago20 years was a friendly underestimate. 2.x was introduced 26 years ago ;-) If it helps, I remember the transition from Linux 0.99 to 1.0, the switch to ELF and Glibc, the first non-x86 architecture support, the introduction of kernel modules, threads being a new feature, and the dropping of 386 support - all but the last happened while I was using Linux as my desktop OS at my day job :-)
- usr1106 4y agoBut 2.6.39 "only" 11 years ago. I would nearly bet that there are still vendors shipping 2.6.x kernels in their embedded systems today. Probably rare...
- CorrectHorseBat 4y agoDon't know about 2.0, can't find anything about it. I know 2 -> 3 was due to changes in development, not breaking of userland.
- usr1106 4y agoNo, the change from 2.6.39 to 3.0 had absolutely no meaning. Changes to the development model happened early in the 2.6 series.
- rodgerd 4y agoMore than that, for many years, the odd minor releases were unstable (1.1, 1.3, 2.1, 2.3) and the evens were stable (1.2, 2.0, 2.2, etc). There could definitely be big churn going from 1.2 -> 2.0, 2.0 -> 2.2 and so on.
- froh 4y agoindeed. and also for libraries semver is happily alive and thriving.
- jlokier 4y agoIt's not supposed to break userspace, but it does from time to time. There's a surprising amount of userspace code which has to check the kernel version number because some behaviour has no "feature check" that can be used. On rare occasions that gets tricky when a distro has backported some kernel change to an old kernel version. Because it's not supposed to be done, most breaking changes are unexpected so it wouldn't be possible to implement semver anyway, or are bug fixes which happen far too often for semver.