[Qemu-devel] Commit 085219f79cad broke Sparc-32 back in 2.6.28.

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

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@ravnborg.org>
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@ravnborg.org>
    Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

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