On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 01:35:30PM -0400, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
> 
> Ruslan Ermilov writes:
>  > Nice.  I was going to ask Peter to upgrade beast with this fix, but
>  > now that you've already tested it, I'd like to back out the hack in
>  > groff/src/roff/groff/Makefile, if there are no objections.
> 
> OK.. with the new rtld, a shared groff works.
> 
> Before you backout the static hack, can you explain the upgrading
> implications?
> 
> Since both a new rtld and a new kernel are required to be able
> to buildworld from an alpha older than yesterday, do we just
> note that in UPDATING, or do we somehow build groff statically
> in the early phase, so that a the early stages of buildworld
> will not depend on having a updated rtld?
> 
OK, to summarize things.  There was a single problem with two
symptoms: 1) groff, if built dynamically, could not be run
by ld-elf.so; 2) groff, if built statically, always failed
with ``out of memory'', apparently due to the same bug.

Static hack is safe to delete because:

1.  groff that is built as part of the bootstrap-tools during
    buildworld will be built static anyway (see -DNOSHARED in
    BMAKE in Makefile.inc1)

2.  if you have a vulnerable kernel and rtld-elf, static
    linkage does not address the problem -- you get spurious
    ``out of memory'' even if you link groff statically.

If you agree, please feel free to commit the backout of
the hack yourself -- I'm going to leave the computer now.  :-)

So, to successfully upgrade your Alpha, you must either
upgrade your kernel and rtld first (which might be a bit
tricky), or to avoid running the bootstrapped groff during
the "transitional" buildworld.  All consumers of groff
are manpages and share/doc documents, with only one nasty
exception -- usr.sbin/lpr/SMM.doc/Makefile, so it should
be possible to buildworld with -DNOMAN, -DNO_SHAREDOCS,
and -DNO_LPR to achieve this -- avoid running groff during
the transitional upgrade.

PS.
Someone could tell me what is different with Alpha so
that it produces only one PT_LOAD segment, compared
to i386?  Just wondering...


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov          Sysadmin and DBA,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]           Sunbay Software AG,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]          FreeBSD committer,
+380.652.512.251        Simferopol, Ukraine

http://www.FreeBSD.org  The Power To Serve
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