Re: 5.1-RELEASE TODO

On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 02:24:59PM -0700, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 09:00:16AM -0400, Robert Watson wrote:
> >    +------------------------------------------------------------------------+
> >    |      Issue       |   Status    | Responsible |       Description       |
> >    |------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------------|
> >    |                  |             |             | There are reports of    |
> >    | ipfw/ipfw2       |             |             | alignment problems with |
> >    | alignment issues | In progress | Luigi Rizzo | ipfw and/or ipfw2 on    |
> >    | on alpha/sparc64 |             |             | 64-bit platforms        |
> >    |                  |             |             | (specifically alpha and |
> >    |                  |             |             | sparc64).               |
> >    +------------------------------------------------------------------------+
> 
> i posted patches and a detailed description for this item
> 3 weeks ago to re_at_ and then the same was forwarded a couple of weeks
> ago to the relevant lists (ipfw, sparc64, alpha) and got no 
> useful feedback (in detail, two message: one 'cannot apply the patch',
> the other one 'it dumps core' without further details).

A gdb stacktrace is much more than "without further details".
It happened inside bcopy.
I asumed that the stacktrace including the sourceline calling bcopy
would be enough.
If you need more then you should say so - I can't guess.

> As i do not have access to these platforms, all i can do is provide
> code and make sure that it compiles (which i did, using a cross-build),
> but for running it (part of the problem involves the kernel) i need
> someone with root&console access to test them.
> 
> I would interpret the absence of feedback as a "nobody cares enough"
> (which is perfectly fine given that these platforms are a negligible
> fraction of the installed base, there are more important issues to
> address and these particular ones should have a relatively trivial
> fix).

It's a chick egg problem - if software regulary fails then less users
will use such hardware or at least avoid that kind of software.
Don't get me wrong: ipfw is good software which I use daily (on i386)
and I'm happy about the recent features you did, but there are two
sides of the story.

-- 
B.Walter                   BWCT                http://www.bwct.de
ticso_at_bwct.de                                  info_at_bwct.de