IA64 port status update

Thibaut Varene faucon.millenium at gmail.com
Thu Mar 10 16:42:01 CST 2005


Hi again,

Here's a short followup on the recent situtation improvement:

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 13:51:23 +0100, Thibaut Varene
<faucon.millenium at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> - State of the port (not considering universe/multiverse):
>   * As of today, we have 1 package FTBFS: syck
>      http://people.ubuntu.com/~lamont/buildLogs/Lists/hoary.failed.ia64

That hasn't changed (nobody looked at it, still existing in debian)

>   * We have 32 packages uninstallable (mostly due to openoffice/language support
>      problems, see below)
>      http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~cjwatson/testing/hoary_probs.html

That number should be drastically reduced by tomorrow, see below

>   So as you can see, the figures are pretty nice.
> 
> - Outstanding issues (not considering universe/multiverse):
>   As of today, we have two main blockers:
>   * OpenOffice.org:
>      OO.o simply doesn't work on 64bit. A workaround would be to use the same
>      tweak as amd64: install OO.o with ia32-libs. That should work,
> but I need help
>      to add lib32gcc1 support to ia32-libs.
>      As a side note, ia32-libs contains an ugly bug: #6923
>      Of course, a broken OO.o means language-support is uninstallable. Hence the
>      above mentioned 32 problems: these are somehow "dep wait" ones.

That issue is fixed, as well as the ia32-libs bug, thanks to the
effort of Tollef Fog Heen. We've successfully installed and used
OpenOffice in 32bit mode on ia64, and language-support is now
installable!
All hail Tollef! :)

>   * Mozilla Firefox Locales:
>      This is a relatively new issue. Mozilla Firefox works just fine
> until one tries to
>      install a locale support, in which case update-mozilla-chrome-registery
>      segfaults. I've been able to reproduce that bug with various
> versions of Firefox
>      (Debian 1-2 and 1-6, Ubuntu 1-6), so I'm not quite sure it's a mozilla bug.
>      I suspect some side effect of not having language support
> installed on ia64.
>      Any help in that area would be warmly welcomed.

This is the remaining issue. Nobody stepped in to help in that area
yet so it hasn't seen much progress. Jeff Bailey and I have been
looking at it lately, and we've done a few preliminary remarks:

- The segfault doesn't exist on Debian, but can be reproduced with
debian binaries installed on Ubuntu
- The segfault can't be reproduced with debug symbols-enabled binaries
- The segfault happens in javascript areas of the code, while running
a strlen variant:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 2305843009238620048 (LWP 19157)]
0x2000000000136001 in js_strlen () from /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/libmozjs.so

Given the above, we can possibly infer that:
- The cause of the bug is something "surrounding" mozilla that isn't
yet available in Debian (something gtk-ish maybe?)
- The cause of the bug is likely to be a missing initialization of
some variable (the segfault suggests NULL pointer passed to strlen).
Probably something that used to initialise to 0 but never actually
promised to, or that kind of bug.

That bug is likely to be very painful to track down, since it can't be
reproduced with debug-symbols enabled. Jeff suggested to build debug
symbol separately (that's  a gdb6 feature, as it seems :) and match
them at debug time...

Can probably be a good lead, but I don't have time to look in that
direction tonight. If anyone wants to help, s/he's welcome!

> - Installer status:

I suppose that Colin will be able to update ia64 seeds to reflect the
recent resolution of the ooffice language support deps, which makes us
much more alike other archs...

> - Acknowledgements:
>   Special kudos to Colin and LaMont for their invaluable help in the
> progress of the

Add Tollef and Jeff to that list now ;o)

> There you are. I think that the two main blocker issues would probably
> be easily (or so I hope) solved if someone with enough insight in
> ia32-libs and language support could give me some hints as how to fix
> these, and then the port would look really good!

So far, we're left with *only one* main blocker, that's the firefox
issue. I hope (and expect) that it can be fixed soon enough to maybe
be able to release a fully fledged Hoary on IA64!

HTH,
T-Bone

-- 
Thibaut VARENE
Ubuntu, Debian and Kernel Hacker

<jbailey> Insert tab A into slot B doesn't take too long to figure
out.  Leave a couple horny kids in a room for an hour, they don't need
instructions.



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