Re: Oops linux 2.4.23-pre6 on amd64

[Andi Kleen <ak@colin2.muc.de>]

On Sun, Oct 05, 2003 at 03:29:38PM +0100, Tony Hoyle wrote:
> Andi Kleen wrote:
> 
> >To rule out the compiler you can use the compiler/binutils from
> >
> >ftp.suse.com:/pub/suse/x86-64/supplementary/CrossTools/8.1-i386/
> >
> OK I built with that and here are the results:
> 
> 1. The ehci-hcd driver fails in exactly the same place.
> 2. It was still v. unstable, which led me to investigate why (since I'm 
> pretty sure the hardware is good & the suse compiler is supposed to be a 
> good one).  I started stripping out options until eventually I found 
> that it's devfs that's the culprit - with that enabled I get random 
> compile errors every few seconds.  With it disabled the compile works 
> perfectly, even with the debian compiler (tried -j20 and -j255 and both 
> passed).

Thanks for tracking this down. I would have never noticed
because I don't use devfs.

Marcelo, any ideas? Do you get broken devfs reports for other
64bit architectures too?

AFAIK devfs is unmaintained and I don't really plan to maintain
it myself. My proposal is to just disable it in the configuration
for x86-64 for now.

> My first guess was you can't use a 32bit devfsd with a 64bit kernel, but 
> stopping devfsd didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference to the 
> stability... only compiling out the entire devfs system solved it.

Very likely the devfs code in the kernel is buggy. It is known
to be race hell, I wouldn't be surprised if it has 64bit bugs too.

-Andi