Subject: Re: net patches

From: William Lee Irwin III <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 22:48:57 -0800

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 21:59:13 -0800 Andrew Morton <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> I'll unload some accumulated net patches.  I can't say that I've looked at
>> them very closely.

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 10:31:04PM -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
> I'll be quiet for the next few days as I try to discover why
> sparc64 now explodes after the past week of changes.  I'm
> heavily suspecting the 4-level page table stuff.  wli kept
> saying that he was having trouble getting his sparc boxes
> working with the -mm tree over the past month and that's about
> how long the 4-level page table stuff has been in there.
> What's odd is that Andi's original 4-level page table patch
> he gave to me worked just fine on sparc64, but it's been
> changed a lot.

I eventually narrowed this down to something associated with some
unusual core fault handling changes with an unclear relationship to
Andi's 4-level code. Something odd was going on with spec-guided
definitions of pte_read(), pte_write(), et al.

sun4u seemed to do okay with Andi's earlier code in my testing; later
problems seemed to stem from elsewhere (e.g. the ioctl bogon).

$ uname -a
Linux analyticity 2.6.10-rc2-mm2 #8 SMP Sat Dec 18 07:57:42 PST 2004 sparc64 GNU/Linux

-- wli