CentOS - Apr 2017 - Need a bit of 'archeocomputing' help on CentOS 7.

I have an application with is binary-only, does its job well, and is 
only available for either libc5 (!) or early early glibc2.0 (!!). It has 
been running on a Red Hat Linux 5.2 (NOT RHEL; RHL) server for a really 
long time, and it honestly does its job and it's not easily replaced by 
an open-source solution at the moment.

So, I need to do one of the following things:
1.) Run Red Hat Linux 5.2 (or similar vintage) on KVM on CentOS 7;
2.) Build libc5 (!) for CentOS 7 and run it on C7 (if that's even possible).

The latest version of libc5 I know of that was shipped by Red Hat is in 
RHL 6.2, libc-5.3.12.  (There is a 5.4, but not sure of stability or 
compatibility).

So, I have RHL 5.2 (Apollo) running on KVM on C7, but I'm not getting 
any networking working.  The only two non-virtio NICs are e1000 and 
rtl8139.  As I recall kernel 2.0.36 and rtl8139 were pretty iffy 
together, and e1000 drivers are not likely available (I couldn't find 
any).  The host's bridge sees the MAC of the guest, but the guest isn't 
seeing any traffic.

So, has anyone tried doing anything this old with modern kvm (I'm using 
the qemu-ev packages, incidentally)?

I've successfully set up the bridging; a CentOS 7 VM on the same host 
has full connectivity.  So it's something about the rtl8139 and the 
2.0.36 kernel.  What is the oldest distribution you've done on KVM on C7?

On 04/21/2017 12:11 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> ...
> The latest version of libc5 I know of that was shipped by Red Hat is 
> in RHL 6.2, libc-5.3.12.  (There is a 5.4, but not sure of stability 
> or compatibility).
> ...
> I've successfully set up the bridging; a CentOS 7 VM on the same host 
> has full connectivity.  So it's something about the rtl8139 and the 
> 2.0.36 kernel.  What is the oldest distribution you've done on KVM on
C7?
Ok, so I've progressed somewhat on this.  Here's what I've so far
found:
1.) RHL 5.2 installs fine, but is a no-go, since it has no networking.
2.) RHL 6.2 installs fine, but is a no-go, with lots and lots of 'hda: 
lost interrupt' errors and eventually the guest is paused and won't 
proceed past a certain point in the boot.  Of all the days for the 
Fedora infrastructure to go completely down, while I'm looking for 
archived RHL (!!!).  For a while I couldn't even get to archive.org.  
Trying to get to bugzilla.redhat.com was impossible, and even archived 
mailing list posts were not available talking about the lost interrupt 
issue  (google's cache will only help you so far).  It was a pretty odd 
sight, seeing a 'www.redhat.com is down but will be back soon' webpage 
come up.
3.) vault.centos.org to the rescue; CentOS 2.1 is essentially an RHL 
7.x-derived distribution, and so I grabbed the two ISOs from a vault 
mirror.  The GUI install crashes out completely, but a text install 
worked swimmingly.  Since the app I need does have a glibc2.1 version, 
and since I already had it downloaded from back in 1998 or so, using the 
RHL 6.2 compat-glibc2.1 packages should work. Installed, booted, and got 
networking.  The C2.1 guest seems stable, and I'm pulling the updates 
repo from vault.centos.org and will set up local repos for yum (yum 
version 1!) and get it as fully updated as C2.1 can be (this isn't 
exposed to the internet).  Once updated and the compat-glibc2.1 
installed will try out the app in a testing mode, then pull over the 
database (postgresql 6.5, but I have a good dump I can restore into the 
C2.1 postgresql) and bring it back live.

Now, there is one other option that I found this morning: the LinuxTech 
repo for CentOS 6 has a libc5 for CentOS 6.  I'm setting up a testing C6 
i386 guest, and will try out the LinuxTech libc5. If that works that 
will be the route I go, since C6 is still updated.  I'm not going to 
abandon the C2.1 setup yet, though, since the app I'm using may need 
some other libs.  We'll see.

So, to answer my own question, CentOS 2.1 is the oldest thing I have 
thus far successfully run with full server functionality in C7's 
qemu-kvm-ev.

> Am 22.04.2017 um 15:42 schrieb Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>:
> 
> On 04/21/2017 12:11 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
>> ...
>> The latest version of libc5 I know of that was shipped by Red Hat is in
RHL 6.2, libc-5.3.12.  (There is a 5.4, but not sure of stability or
compatibility).
>> ...
>> I've successfully set up the bridging; a CentOS 7 VM on the same
host has full connectivity.  So it's something about the rtl8139 and the
2.0.36 kernel.  What is the oldest distribution you've done on KVM on C7?
> Ok, so I've progressed somewhat on this.  Here's what I've so
far found:


Silly question: isn?t there something like a ?compat-CentOS5?-package one can
install and that contains all the base-libraries for CentOS 5?

I run a FreeBSD 6 (32 bit) binary on a 64 bit FreeBSD 11 VM (because the source,
if we had it, would most likely not compile with whatever LLVM ships with 11 ?).
FreeBSD offers ?compat? packages down to version 4. These are libraries that
install into /usr/lib/compat.

Obviously, the system is designed for this - but why is nobody doing this for
Linux?

I just looked it up:
FreeBSD 4.0 was released over 17 years ago, around the same time as RHL 6.2?

On Apr 21, 2017, at 10:11 AM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>
wrote:
> 
> 1.) Run Red Hat Linux 5.2 (or similar vintage) on KVM on CentOS 7;
For what it?s worth, I couldn?t get it working under a modern flavor of VMware,
either.  I find that telling because VMware tends to have the best driver
support of all the VM systems, if only because it?s been around the longest.

Unfortunately, current VMware appears to have dropped Linux 2.0 support
entirely, along with other contemporaneous things.  For instance, even the
?legacy Linux? version of its VMware Tools package contains Perl scripts that
are written with the assumption that they?re running on at least Perl 5.8, which
is contemporaneous with RHL 7.3 and kernel 2.4.18.

I spent some time trying to backport those scripts to the Perl 5.004 that ships
with RHL 5.2, but gave up after making over a dozen changes with no obvious end
in sight.

The way I see it, your solution involving CentOS 2.1 and the libc5 compatibility
libraries just bought you the last upgrade to your software that you are likely
to pull off without heroic efforts.  I advise you to use CentOS 7?s remaining
supported lifetime to get off this old software somehow.

You say there is no open source alternative, yet clearly the software was useful
to at least you, and probably others, given that it appears to be commercial
software.  It might be prudent to sponsor the development of an open source
replacement system.
> e1000 drivers are not likely available (I couldn't find any).
That series of adapters didn?t get Linux support until about 2 years after RHL 5
shipped, according to the sources:

   
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000/e1000_main.c

That would make the e1000 driver about ~3 years too late for you.