Glibc 2.7 On CentOS / RHEL 5

glibc 2.7 introduces a new flag to open() syscall, called O_CLOEXEC.

The official redhat 2.6.18 kernel (even of version 5.1) doesn’t support it, and returns errors (in strace it looks like open() returns unknown error 530).

So.. just try not to use glibc 2.7 on RedHat, until they support it. If you want an adventure, this kernel seems to do the job..

How did I encounter this uncommon problem, you ask? I’m running Debian unstable VM inside a CentOS5 host (the VM’s kernel is actually a CentOS5 kernel). Debian upgraded glibc to 2.7, and later the VM couldn’t function (open /etc/passwd gave error 530). Not too smart of me, I guess. But dzickus kernel seems to solve it.