Commit 085219f79cad broke Sparc-32 back in 2.6.28.

From: Rob Landley
Date: Sun Feb 21 2010 - 11:36:16 EST


On Saturday 20 February 2010 17:12:22 Rob Landley wrote:
> On Saturday 20 February 2010 15:59:31 Blue Swirl wrote:
> > > I've got 2.6.32 booting to a command prompt (albeit with serial console
> > > and intentionall restricted set of hardware). But then it misbehaves.
> > >
> > > I'll try getting 2.6.18 to build with a known .config, and then bisect
> > > forward if that seems to work...
> >
> > Good plan. Bisecting backwards could be interesting too, to find out
> > which releases are actually working out of the box.
>
> I started by iterating through the release versions. It's working up
> through 2.6.28, then 2.6.29 has the out of memory error in my init script.
>
> Bisecting now...
>
> Rob

And the commit that broke it bisects to:

085219f79cad89291699bd2bfb21c9fdabafe65f is first bad commit
commit 085219f79cad89291699bd2bfb21c9fdabafe65f
Author: Sam Ravnborg <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri Jan 2 18:47:34 2009 -0800

sparc32: use proper types in struct stat

Like sparc64 use proper types in struct stat

Signed-off-by: Sam Ravnborg <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

This commit breaks stat and makes sparc32 essentially unusable. It changes
the size of the various types in stat.h, and means that if you "mount -t tmpfs
/tmp /tmp" and then try to ls /tmp, ls dies with a memory allocation error.

I've confirmed that reverting it fixes the problem.

Looking at the actual diff, here's the hunk that causes problems:

--- a/arch/sparc/include/asm/stat_32.h
+++ b/arch/sparc/include/asm/stat_32.h
short st_nlink;
- unsigned short st_uid;
- unsigned short st_gid;
+ uid_t st_uid;
+ gid_t st_gid;

The symptom (in my uClibc+busybox root filesystem) is:

/ # mount -t tmpfs /tmp /tmp
/ # ls -l /tmp
ls: can't open '/tmp': Cannot allocate memory
total 0

The problem is that both uid_t and gid_t are "int" instead of "short". This
patch changes the size of those types. (I note that this is apparently a
known issue, there's __compat_uid_t and friends in the sparc asm directory...)

Rob
--
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds
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