does e2fsprogs work on powerpc?

[Steve Langasek]

Since karmic, the e2fsprogs udeb has been built with -O2 instead of -Os on powerpc because of bug #450214, which was presumed at the time to be a toolchain bug. It doesn't look like a bug was ever filed against the toolchain for this, and it doesn't appear the issue has ever been reported in Debian, so it's likely that whatever the issue was, it was transient and has since been resolved.

However, with no information about what the toolchain bug actually *was*, we can't be sure of this without testing.

I've dropped the -Os workaround in the latest merge of e2fsprogs from Debian. We should retest at alpha-1 to see if the installer is usable on powerpc without this workaround.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: e2fsprogs 1.41.14-1ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Oct 17 14:28:00 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100816.1)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: e2fsprogs
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-09-23 (23 days ago)

[Theodore Ts'o (tytso)]

I looked at LP#450214, and was very confused how it was decided there was a toolchain bug that was causing a problem with e2fsprogs (especially when the bug title talked about gparted hanging when formatting a swap partition).

In any case, I know there are folks at IBM testing e2fsprogs 1.42-WIP with PowerPC, but given that it's not clear to me what the original symptoms of the bug was at the e2fsprogs level were (as opposed to gparted hanging when formatting a swap partition), I can't even begin to investigate what the original bug might have been.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Ted: Yes, I can't say I'm sure why e2fsprogs got involved there. I suspect nobody investigated terribly closely. :-(

Steve: I tried to look into this today, and discovered that I'm unable to run an installer test on powerpc right now because pata-macio is missing from the relevant udeb so the installer can't talk to any CD or disk devices, at least in my qemu configuration. I'll send a patch to the kernel team for that, and retry this test for alpha-2.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I've now tested on powerpc (in qemu) and there's no evidence of any problem during partitioning. Whatever this originally was has clearly gone away.