Ubuntu
eglibc package

Bug #587186
Comment #87

Comment 87 for bug 587186

Revision history for this message

In Red Hat Bugzilla #579838, Dont (dont-redhat-bugs) wrote on 2010-06-08:

#87

There is no clarification needed by FESCo. The release was intended to support the Geode LX -- whether or not it is an "i686" (it isn't). Nothing in the F13 release specifications says anything about changing the set of supported CPUs from F12, which clearly supported the Geode LX (see Comment 1).

Further investigation in the released Fedora 13 i686 LiveCD reveals that NOPL instructions only occur in binaries produced from glibc, and in a couple of statically linked binaries (/sbin/sln and /sbin/mdadm.static) linked with glibc.

NOPL instructions can be generated by the GNU Assembler for .align commands that occur in executable sections. GCC can generate .align when optimizing, to align loop starts on cache line boundaries. Gas only generates NOPL when instructed that the machine architecture supports it. Apparently, sometime between F12 and F13, either gas's .align support was improved or enbugged, or the arguments to gas when compiling glibc were changed to an inappropriate value that excluded the Geode LX.

This is not a generic problem with every package in the release -- it's a bug in the build configuration or Makefiles of glibc. This should be fixable by rebuilding the binary packages derived from glibc. This won't fix the release CDs and DVDs, but will fix the repos, which is key for the largest affected Fedora customer, OLPC. However, this problem HAS been reported by other users on other Geode LX hardware; see:

http://sharkcz.livejournal.com/5708.html

This bug was timely reported, but the report was ignored while there was plenty of time to fix the release.

This bug should be reopened -- but bugzilla.redhat.com does not seem to offer me a user interface with which to do that.

The priority of this bug should be increased, because it causes the release media to fail to boot and fail to install on supported hardware. For the same reason, it should also be documented in the release notes here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs#Hardware-related_issues

There is no clarification needed by FESCo.  The release was intended to support the Geode LX -- whether or not it is an "i686" (it isn't).  Nothing in the F13 release specifications says anything about changing the set of supported CPUs from F12, which clearly supported the Geode LX (see Comment 1).

NOPL instructions can be generated by the GNU Assembler for .align commands that occur in executable sections.  GCC can generate .align when optimizing, to align loop starts on cache line boundaries.  Gas only generates NOPL when instructed that the machine architecture supports it.  Apparently, sometime between F12 and F13, either gas's .align support was improved or enbugged, or the arguments to gas when compiling glibc were changed to an inappropriate value that excluded the Geode LX.

This is not a generic problem with every package in the release -- it's a bug in the build configuration or Makefiles of glibc.  This should be fixable by rebuilding the binary packages derived from glibc.  This won't fix the release CDs and DVDs, but will fix the repos, which is key for the largest affected Fedora customer, OLPC.  However, this problem HAS been reported by other users on other Geode LX hardware; see: