Compiling 2.6 kernel questions

Hi,

I'm trying to compile 2.6.32-pre8 and have some questions that I hoped
someone could help me to answer. They aren't really specific to the
kernel version, other than I'm using 2.6.

- Is it possible to compile a kernel with glibc-2.10.1 and run it on a
system with a much older glibc version? Specifically, I'd like to
upgrade a v2.4 kernel system to v2.6 with only the minimal amount of
changes in order for it to run.

- Is it necessary to compile the IDE driver and ext2/3 filesystem
driver into the kernel, or can that also be a module? If so, and I put
it in initrd,. how is it accessed? Isn't it a catch-22 without having
support to access the very ramdisk that has the support that's
necessary to access it?

If this can be done, where can I find info on the steps?

- Is there a general list of minimum requirements for compiling a
recent 2.6 kernel? IOW,  module-init-tools, gcc, etc.

- Does anyone use lilo anymore, or do all distros use grub?

Thanks so much.
Best regards,
Alex