SIGILL on SPARCstation 10

[Markus Mayer <a9325155@unet.univie.ac.at>]

Hi,

I'm using Debian 'testing' on a SPARCstation 10 and getting really
desperate since I'm experiencing a SIGILL problem with libc.

The last update installed the newest libc (2.3.2-7), but now each program
that uses sscanf (and maybe other functions, too) produces an illegal
instruction (SIGILL).

E.g. this program will fail now:

int main()
{

  float f; 
  sscanf("123.45", "%f", &f);
  return(0);
}

I tried rebuilding libc myself, but that's a very lengthy and tiresome
process as a 40MHz SS10 is not a computer one could exactly consider 'fast'.
Moreover diskspace is fairly limited and glibc needs *huge* amounts of
space.

I did it nontheless and this is what I noticed: I (partly) recompiled glibc
manually (not using Debian scripts and using only -O as opposed to -O2), the
resulting libc.so worked. Since I didn't compile any other shared lib
(because of disk-space) all programs that also use libnss_compat now fail
using my re-compiled libc (even those working with the broken libc). The
SIGILL is gone, though.

$ w
w: relocation error: /lib/libnss_compat.so.2: symbol
__nss_lookup_function, version GLIBC_PRIVATE not defined in file libc.so.6
with link time reference

So no real solution there.

Next I tried using the Debian scripts to compile everything (seeing that the
libc worked it seemed to be worth the effort). However, the libc produced by
that does *NOT* work (-> SIGILL). So I suspect it's the compiler options the
Debian build uses combined with a GCC bug that causes the behaviour (it's
gcc version 3.3.1 20030626 (Debian prerelease) btw). Not sure, though.

But again no solution.

I also tried to find an older version of libc (like 2.3.1-something). Google
still finds them, but they've all been pulled. Not a chance to download one
anywhere. And using libc 2.2 is not possible as it would break *everything*.

Yet again no solution.

Any suggestions what I can do short of wiping the hard-drive and
re-installing from CD (which would be a *real* pain; the machine is in a
server room, so I couldn't do it myself).

Many thanks to all.

Regards,
Markus