Re: Oopses with pre-patch-2.1.43

Mike Meissner (meissner@cygnus.com)
Tue, 17 Jun 1997 12:20:29 -0400

Linus Torvalds writes:
| In article <199706160658.IAA11439@wilma.rz.uni-leipzig.de>,
| Dirk Weigenand <weigo@wilma.rz.uni-leipzig.de> wrote:
| >
| >i'm running pre-patch-2.1.43 and am encountering oopses
| >(nonfatal).
|
| You should count yourself lucky that the oopses are non-fatal: the
| pre-2.1.43 kernel is definitely rather unstable.
|
| It's the new name cache which hasn't been completely debugged yet, but
| never fear, I'll make a real 2.1.43 shortly which will be a good step on
| the way to stability (unlike the pre-patches, it's actually stable for
| me now). It probably will take a few releases to really get all the new
| problems, but we'll have a much better VFS naming strategy after it is
| all done (thanks for Thomas Schoebel and Dave Miller for the work they
| put into this).
|
| The new code is a lot faster, and also allows some really cool features
| (an _efficient_ getcwd() and a safe undelete feature).

In building 2.1.43, I noticed two problems:

1) make xconfig doesn't work:

./tkparse < ../arch/i386/config.in > kconfig.tmp
Bad if clause at line 146(drivers/net/Config.in):[ -f drivers/net/soundmodem/sm_afsk2666.c ]; then
make[1]: *** [kconfig.tk] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/meissner/src/linux-2.1.43/scripts'
make: *** [xconfig] Error 2

2) drivers/char/rtc.c has a typo in it:

gcc -D__KERNEL__ -I/home/meissner/src/linux-2.1.43/include -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -D__SMP__ -pipe -fno-strength-reduce -m486 -malign-loops=2 -malign-jumps=2 -malign-functions=2 -DCPU=686 -D__SMP__ -c -o rtc.o rtc.c
rtc.c: In function `rtc_read':
rtc.c:183: parse error before `)'
rtc.c:155: warning: `retval' might be used uninitialized in this function
rtc.c: In function `rtc_ioctl':
rtc.c:265: warning: unused variable `retval'
rtc.c:308: warning: unused variable `retval'
rtc.c:421: warning: passing arg 1 of `__constant_copy_to_user' makes pointer from integer without a cast
rtc.c:421: warning: passing arg 1 of `__generic_copy_to_user' makes pointer from integer without a cast
make[3]: *** [rtc.o] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/meissner/src/linux-2.1.43/drivers/char'
make[2]: *** [first_rule] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/meissner/src/linux-2.1.43/drivers/char'
make[1]: *** [sub_dirs] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/meissner/src/linux-2.1.43/drivers'
make: *** [linuxsubdirs] Error 2

| Linus