Thanks, and good info to know.? The first release of Slack for ARM started at the 3.x kernel, so I don't think there is a realistic path to getting a 2.6 on bare metal Pi hardware.
My Pi-3 running the 2019 image of Buster kernel 4.19.50-v7+ is still running.? Plenty of ax25 packets through it, and no weird system messages.? So far, this looks good.
All the repos for ancient distros I work with are still out there.? The URL has changed, but the content is there.
I think I need to deploy this RMS Gateway on the 4.x kernel and patiently wait for the ax25 code to catch up, or someone writes it in userspace.? I just learned about JNOS2 which sounds like userspace ax25.? More research needed.