Chrome "unofficially" dropped support for pre-3.16 kernels, such as the kernel in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, about half a year ago. More precisely, they introduced a bug that caused installing extensions to fail with that kernel, and then declined to fix it.<p><a href="https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=401655" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=401655</a><p>See comment #47: "Ok, while it sounds like this is technically a regression, I'm going to mark this as Wontfix because there is a reasonable workaround of updating your kernel."
Really, a browser is now dependent on a particular Linux kernel?<p>For example RHEL/CentOS 7 which was released just last year with at least a 10 year support ahead of it is now obsolete according to them because it has a kernel version 3.10...<p>Not that many people are on desktop versions of those OSes, and those that are will not use Chrome (for example, US govt loves them some Desktop RHEL systems, but Chrome is usually not allowed there anyway), but just highlighting how still seems a bit crazy.
Replies so far for the lazy:<p>On Sat, Mar 07, 2015 at 07:17:13PM +0200, Georgi Naplatanov wrote:<p>> On 03/07/2015 06:38 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote:<p>> > On Sat, 2015-03-07 at 16:09 +0100, D. F. wrote:<p>> >> Hello, Julien Tinnes from google says that next releases of<p>> >> chromium will drops support for kernels without TSYNC<p>> >> ubuntu 14.10 already has been patched<p>> >> Can I to expect that debian 8/jessie will have support for<p>> >> TSYNC?<p>> > Sounds like another good reason to not use Google spyware.<p>> Google Chrome for Linux is the only possibility to use latest version<p>> of Adobe flash player for Linux as far as I know.<p>another good reason not to use it.<p>--
maks<p>I guess this is why Gentoo is still my distro of choice after all these years.
It's much more interesting to see how useful the replies are.<p>I assume they're because it's a dumb question, but still. This is an excellent example of an unwelcoming / hostile culture.
I don't think Chromium has dropped support for kernels <= 3.16. ChromiumOS uses 3.4, 3.8, 3.10, and 3.14 depending on device. All of those are less than 3.16, but as far as I know, ChromiumOS is not going away.<p>It appears a patch needs to be cherry-picked back; a pretty common task for people that maintain older kernels. It's very common to backport patches to drivers you care about (because new kernel versions always introduce bugs in your obscure hardware, you only backport stuff that doesn't already work). There is even a system for doing it in an automated manner: <a href="http://drvbp1.linux-foundation.org/~mcgrof/rel-html/backports/" rel="nofollow">http://drvbp1.linux-foundation.org/~mcgrof/rel-html/backport...</a>
This is not the first time that Chromium team doesn't care about even slightly older distros. Apart from the infamous RHEL 6 case, there is also the recent wheezy case.<p>Back in September, there was a plan for requiring at least GCC 4.9 for building Chromium, which made building new releases for Debian wheezy in a pure Debian wheezy environment impossible. [0]<p>Debian lacks the manpower of RedHat for backporting and supporting new software (which is GCC 4.9 for this case), so Stable Release Team and Security Team are not the most liberal teams when it comes to approving new packages into a stable release, and as a result, Chromium is not supported in Wheezy as of last month. [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=763278" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=763278</a><p>[1] <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2015/msg00031.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2015/msg00...</a>
Wow that's extreme.
They could broadcast seccomp across thread for older kernels.<p>One day it's going to be "use Google's fork of the kernel".<p>Of course, Firefox and others work fine on "older" kernels.
The answer seems to be "yes", as Jessie has a 3.16 kernel.<p>Lots of speculation though - there's no official announcement, as far as I'm aware, and the OP on the mailing list did not identify as a Google employee.
Most people update the kernel when their distro does. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is currently at a .5 version with kernel 3.13. There seem to be no plans for a 12.04.6 with a newer kernel but we'll see.<p>Maybe TSYNC can be backported to 3.13 (I'm unsure about who has to do it) or Chromium can be compiled without TSYNC (distro's choice). If nothing happens this is going to cost Google some users but obviously it's their browser and their choice of how to implement it and where it can run.
So, is this a feature that will also appear in Chrome for Android? Is there even an overlap in codebase? [I honestly have no idea]<p>Given that a lot of handsets run ridiculously old Kernels, I assume that this feature will not be usable for the next few generations of handsets (or will have to be backported, obviously).
Perhaps it is a good things. Many kernel devs aparently don't like the method of back porting fixes for ages the way Debian does. They say the Arch way is fine and one should not be too afraid to upgrade in between. Perhaps Debian could start trying this? In other words, is the Debian stable method still needed in this day and age? Perhaps a good start for a discussion.
"Most" chromiumOS developers use 14.04 LTS [1]... Which is 3.13.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide" rel="nofollow">http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide</a><p>Kinda surprising... but not really.
Google never gave a single fuck about older distros. It took a few days after Debian 7 going stable that they stopped supporting Debian 6 (by requiring newer libc).