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?