Bug#400372: dpkg randomly craches on Sparc32 running HyperSPARC processor

[Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org>]

Hi Joel,

Sorry, I cannot reproduce the behavior you are describing. I have a 
SS20 box, running sid with Debian's linux-image-2.6.18-3-sparc32 
(version 2.6.18-6) kernel:

debian:~# uname -a
Linux debian 2.6.18-3-sparc32 #1 Fri Nov 24 16:10:16 GMT 2006 sparc GNU/Linux
debian:~# cat /proc/version 
Linux version 2.6.18-3-sparc32 (Debian 2.6.18-6) (waldi@debian.org) (gcc version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-20)) #1 Fri Nov 
24 16:10:16 GMT 2006
debian:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
cpu             : ROSS HyperSparc RT625 or RT626
fpu             : ROSS HyperSparc combined IU/FPU
promlib         : Version 3 Revision 2
prom            : 2.25
type            : sun4m
ncpus probed    : 2
ncpus active    : 1
CPU0Bogo        : 133.12
CPU0ClkTck      : 133000000
MMU type        : ROSS HyperSparc
contexts        : 4096
nocache total   : 2252800
nocache used    : 492800

To stress-test dpkg I've just ran 'apt-get install kde' on an unstable 
system. That a pretty big update:

[..]
0 upgraded, 400 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 242MB of archives.
After unpacking 678MB of additional disk space will be used.

and it completed without any problems. I also do not recall having any 
problems with dpkg recently. 

What OBP version do you have in these machines? ISTR that to run 
latest HyperSPARC CPUs from Ross you need either 2.25 from Sun, or 
2.25R from Ross. If you are running anything lower, I suggest you try 
to upgrade your firmware, see http://www.sunshack.org/data/bootroms.html
for details.

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov                                           jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/                      KeyID: C99E03CC