Hi Alex,
available in more recent kernel versions. On the other hand a "too new"
kernel > might have removed some (by now deprecated) interfaces, that older programs > still rely on. One rather important thing that was deprecated is the proc > interface (or was it sys?),
I have some experience building recent-ish kernels to properly support
old,
old Debian systems. From that, I wouldn't expect any major problems as soon as it's clear which deprecated (but still existing or emulated)
interfaces
are actually required.
If there's any interest I could try to put some work into this (but I got
my
Pandora just a couple of days ago and probably need some time to get into the whole thing first)...
You're very welcome to work on that a little if you want but to be useful in the context of firmware testing you would really want to build it using OpenEmbedded so all the dependent out of tree stuff is included in the way the image expects (modules such as compat-wireless and the like).
That's the main reason I see it as a pain (and switching a single build environment to build 2 firmware images, one older and one newer is not really that efficient from a productivity point of view), if it was just a case of hacking about and building the kernel directly until it booted well it would not really be a problem (in fact 2.6.37 boots mostly fine on the current firmware) but if you want to use it in the context of repeatable regression testing it needs to fit with the build setup. By the time you have done all that work you have something that is not all that far from the .next build tree anyway ;).
Regards,
John