Hi, Ruby 1.8 in Debian has been misbehaving on sparc for some time (http://bugs.debian.org/393817): jurij@goofy:~$ ruby1.8 Illegal instruction jurij@goofy:~$ uname -a Linux goofy 2.6.22-1-sparc64-smp #1 SMP Sun Aug 12 01:17:37 NZST 2007 sparc64 GNU/Linux This has been traced to the following code fragment in Ruby's defines.h: #if defined(sparc) || defined(__sparc__) static inline void flush_register_windows(void) { asm #ifdef __GNUC__ volatile #endif # if defined(__sparc_v9__) || defined(__sparcv9) || defined(__arch64__) ("flushw") # elif defined(linux) || defined(__linux__) ("ta 0x83") # else /* Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. */ ("ta 0x03") # endif /* trap always to flush register windows if we are on a Sparc system */ ; } # define FLUSH_REGISTER_WINDOWS flush_register_windows() [...] In Debian we are still generating instructions for v8 by default (this is going to change soon, as we have decided to drop sparc32 support for the next release), so it tries to execute 'ta 0x83'. This leads to illegal instruction, but, interestingly enough, only on UltrasparcIII or better (originally the bug has been discovered on Niagara, confirmed on Blade 1000 and Blade 2500). Machines with UltrasparcII do not have any problems with this instruction. As it is unlikely that it's this instruction itself which is causing a SIGILL, my guess is that the illegal instruction is hit somewhere in the trap handler in the kernel, however I was not able to debug it further yet. Any ideas would be appreciated. Best regards, -- Jurij Smakov jurij@xxxxxxxxx Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe sparclinux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
