(I am not subscribed to debian-sparc, but I am subscribed to debian-devel. If you don't cc debian-devel, please cc me.)
Hello folks, OpenAFS (a distributed file system client and server with a fairly old code base) has userspace client programs and servers that use its internal lightweight threading library. Upstream is working slowly on converting this to pthreads for Linux, but we're not quite there yet. In the meantime, it needs to either know rather too much about the internals of glibc data structures (which broke as of glibc 2.3) or it needs to have getcontext/setcontext functions. As of the upgrade to glibc 2.3, we've switched the OpenAFS packages for all platforms over to using getcontext/setcontext. The problem is that these functions are not implemented for 32-bit SPARC, which means that the client no longer works for Debian's sparc architecture. This is a fairly long-standing bug against glibc (Bug#295173) and it seems unlikely to me that anyone wants to implement and maintain this code for 32-bit SPARC. I've verified that building the OpenAFS userspace programs 64-bit instead of 32-bit results in working binaries. So, I'm looking for guidance at this point. It seems like my alternatives (other than convincing someone to implement these functions for 32-bit SPARC) are to either drop the SPARC architecture for OpenAFS or to build the OpenAFS packages 64-bit on SPARC, which I believe is against the normal intention of the sparc architecture. However, with the proposed dropping of the 32-bit sparc kernel, perhaps building programs with these sorts of technical requirements for the 64-bit environment is a reasonable thing to do? I welcome any advice. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
