Intel Has Last Round Of DRM Changes For Linux 3.19, Starts Dropping DRI1/UMS

[curaga]

Yes. The kernel is rightfully extremely strict on breaking userspace. You can install the latest 3.x kernel on a 2.4-based distro from 2001 and expect almost everything to work. 3d is one of the big exceptions.

[Ansla]

Not quite, procfs, sysfs and other stuff that should only be used by system utilities is not backwards compatible. So if you install a new kernel on a 2.4-based distro it will most likely have problems booting. This will only get worse for distros using systemd as it is much closely tied to kernel internals.

The only stuff that the kernel tries to avoid breaking are statically-linked old binaries that don't need special privileges. If a program is meant to run as root the kernel guys consider it must be kept resonably up to date.

[nanonyme]

Enterprise releases are free to keep shipping DRI1 no matter what upstream decides anyway. Eg RH already afaik does heavy modifications to kernel and other components.