Re: Between a rock & a hard place, need monolithic 2.4.2x kernel for sun4m
On Tue, 26 Jul 2005 01:40:48 +0200
Frans Pop <aragorn@tiscali.nl> wrote:
> On Tuesday 26 July 2005 01:31, Eric Jorgensen wrote:
> > Yes, since i have an RT626 i don't really meet the "if and only if"
> > clause on needing to upgrade the kernel first.
>
> Hmmm?
>
> RT626 = SS20 = sun4m ?
> (/me is not very familiar with Sparc models...)
>
> "sun4m CPUs are still supported but you need to install a newer kernel
> version first before upgrading the system. This is necessary because
> newer versions of glibc use assembler instructions not available on
> certain machines, so you need a updated kernel first that emulates the
> missing instructions."
>
> That means you qualify for the "if and only if" in 4.3.1, right?
Nope, keep reading.
"For those interested in the gory details: some of the sun4m chips,
produced by Cypress/ROSS, don't implement the umul instruction
(RT601/CY7C601, same chip, only different names). They were used in the
early SPARCserver 6xxMP models. Later models used chips manufactured by TI.
Currently we don't know if these are also affected."
This means that an extremely small number of machines are affected. Those
are not particularly common boxes. It should be possible to detect via
/proc/cpuinfo if the 601 is installed.
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