Re: [reiserfs-list] ReiserFS Oops (2.4.1, deterministic, symlink

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

"Albert D. Cahalan" wrote:
> 
> Hans Reiser writes:
> > Alan Cox wrote:
> >> [Ablert Cahalan]
> 
> >>> In an __init function, have some code that will trigger the bug.
> >>> This can be used to disable Reiserfs if the compiler was bad.
> >>> Then the admin gets a printk() and the Reiserfs mount fails.
> >>
> >> Thats actually quite doable. I'll see about dropping the test
> >> into -ac that way.
> >
> > NOOOOO!!!!!! It should NOT fail at mount time, it should fail
> > at compile time.
> 
> Detection at compile time is not reliable. Just last week, on a
> plain x86 box with a good gcc, I was compiling with a compiler
> called "/usr/local/bin/powerpc-linux-gcc". Guess what that does.
> 
> My compiler was not in the RPM database. My compiler could not
> produce executables that would run on the build system, so build-time
> tests wouldn't work. Compiler version information is fairly useless,
> since x86-specific bugs don't matter at all. Maybe I even patched
> my compiler.
> 
> Complaints about the local compiler are useful, but not sufficient.
> They only protect the menuconfig program, the mkdep program...
> As above, actual bug tests are better than trying to interpret
> what the compiler reports for a version.

We only detect bad compilers, and our particular bad compiler only exists on one
particular distro, so it works.

Hans
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