Hi, On 13.6.2025 17.53, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On Fri, 2025-06-13 at 17:15 +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:Wouldn't next upgrade completely break user's Debian system so it needs complete re-install?You would need to extract the glibc package manually from my tests. After that, upgrading the system should be possible.
I think quite a bit more binaries than just Glibc are needed for Debian upgrade tooling to work, but OK.
As to other potential issues...I assume there are no m68k port packages with closed source executable code (FW) [1], like the other architectures (esp. x86) have & need, and that any code intended to work also on non-m68k platform, should be fine with 4-byte alignment.
But what about m68k specific C/C++ and assembly code that may hard-code 2-byte alignment assumptions; is there any tooling to detect (potential) alignment issues in those?
Or is the plan just to rely on packages' self-tests to reveal issues, and then track them down from there?
[1] Are sources for "bootstra.tos" & "amiboot" anywhere, in case they need updates:
https://wiki.debian.org/M68k/Installing https://people.debian.org/~wouter/d-i/images/20130502-06:51/tools/atari/ https://people.debian.org/~wouter/d-i/images/20130502-06:51/tools/amiga/ ?
If true, would separate m68k arch for 4-byte alignment be out of question, similarly how there have been different ARM arch variants?Creating a separate arch would mean patching various parts of Debian which again would involve a lot of work which I don't think is worth the effort.
...
That's why I want to make a hard cut and not invest months of work when the userbase consists of just a few people.
Ok, fair enough.Are there any statistics on how many Debian packages do (still) include m68k assembly?
If that number is limited enough, it could help in getting other people to review the assembly code for potential alignment issues...
Glibc is likely on top of that list (but also most likely to be alignment neutral):
glibc$ find -name '*.S' | grep m68k | wc -l 25As *BSD already uses 4-byte alignment, I assume that for packages containing m68k assembly that do support / work also on *BSD in addition to Linux, m68k asm code used on both should work fine, and one needs to review only m68k asm that differs on Linux.
(I'm thinking of acceleration code, not syscall bindings, those I guess to differ anyway between the OSes.)
- Eero