Re: Debian testing/unstable on RiscPC ?
on Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 02:12:36AM +0100, Peter Teichmann wrote:
> When I have done all these steps and finally start the installation of
> unstable, I only get to the point when it updates debconf. There, the
> debconf.postinst script causes a segmentation fault.
It turns out that all versions of gcc since 3.2 have been generating
ARMv4 code as default, which won't run on RiscPC or ARM7 machines. This
was due to a bug introduced upstream in late 2001. As a result, any
binary that has been generated since gcc-3.2 became the default compiler
may potentially be tainted with v4 instructions.
Since this problem has gone unnoticed for over a year, and RiscPC
support has always been kind of sketchy in any case, I'm kind of
inclined to just declare that Debian will no longer support ARMv3
processors from Sarge onwards. There is some precedent for this in
other architectures: the SPARC port has dropped sun4c in Sarge, and the
x86 port has likewise dropped i386. Nobody has shown a great deal of
interest in implementing debian-installer for RiscPC, which also
suggests that there are not very many users on this platform any more.
(It would still be perfectly possible for someone to maintain an
unofficial port for v3 machines with its own binary archive, if there is
a desire for such a thing.)
So, if anybody knows of compelling reasons why v3 support should be
retained, please speak out now.
p.
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