Re: SPARC kernel questions
edmundo@rano.demon.co.uk writes:
> A couple of questions appeared in my mind while upgrading to 2.2.10:
> (1) This business of having to install /etc/init.d/devpts.sh from
> potato's libc6 to make a recent 2.2.x kernel work if
> CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS is selected. It's not too hard to do by hand, but
> it doesn't seem right that people should have to do that sort of thing
> merely in order to use a more up-to-date kernel. You can't tell people
> to update their libc6 to unstable just in order to use a newer kernel;
> we've already seen how an unstable libc6 can make a system unusable in
> some unfortunate cases. So is there another solution, other than
> telling people how to extract and install /etc/init.d/devpts.sh by
> hand?
Delete /dev/ptmx. libc6 only tries to use /dev/pts if /dev/ptmx
exists, otherwise it falls back on the oldstyle ptys.
I personally would just tell people to upgrade. This is not i386;
slink for the sparc has a _beta_ version of the glibc-2.1 that is in
unstable - there are very few problems, if any, in updating. If Debian
did non-security updates, I would strongly advocate copying libc6 from
potato to slink.
> (2) I built a kernel with CONFIG_SMP, which is the default, and was
> welcomed by this message (coming from linux/arch/sparc/mm/nosun4c.c):
> SILO boot:
> Uncompressing image...
> 32bit SMP kernel only supports sun4m and sun4d
> Program terminated
> Is there no way, at present, of building a kernel which does SMP on
> some suns but works on all suns?
Apparently not. (SMP kernels are slower than non-smp kernels
anyways.)
Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu
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