[Mesa-dev] [PATCH] i965: Bump official kernel requirement to Linux v3.9.

[Emil Velikov]

On 31 January 2018 at 19:33, Kenneth Graunke <kenneth at whitecape.org> wrote:
> In commit 3f353342a6b6744773c26ed66b12afed42bd57af (present in 17.3.0)
> we started unconditionally using I915_EXEC_NO_RELOC, which was
> introduced in Linux v3.9.  ChromeOS kernel 3.8 has backported this,
> so it should work too.
>
> Running on older kernels would likely result in every single batch
> being rejected by the kernel, which is pretty catastrophic.  Yet, it
> appears that nobody noticed.  So, let's just bump the official
> requirement and move forward ever so slowly.
>
> Fixes: 3f353342a6b ("i965: Use I915_EXEC_NO_RELOC")
> ---

The 3.9 kernel was released nearly 5 years ago, with 5 LTS kernels since then.
IMHO, it is perfectly reasonable to have it as minimum requirement,
esp. with the 'side-effect' in mind.

Quick look at some distros/versions (via distrowatch) having a 3.9+ kernel
 - Debian 8 (oldstable)
 - Mint 16
 - Ubuntu 13.10 (already EOL)
 - elementary 0.3.2
 - Fedora 19
 - openSUSE 13.1
 - CentOS 7 (earlier versions list 2.6.x series kernel)

FWIW, the patch is
Acked-by: Emil Velikov <emil.velikov at collabora.com>

-Emil