Re: coreutils-6.6 check failures on Itanium Linux

[Bob Proulx]

Jim Meyering wrote:
> I don't think coreutils should try to work around this kernel/fs bug.
> Do you know if this is fixed in later 2.4.x releases?  I sure hope so.

I really doubt it.  AFAIK the linux kernel folks don't really claim
support for ia64 on the 2.4 kernel.  It just barely worked there.  I
remember having a lot of issues with it.  The linux 2.6 series was
where the work went in to make it stable.  Red Hat however backported
a lot of ia64 patches into their 2.4 stream so as to release it to
their customers.

I agree that this is not really something that coreutils can work
around in the code.  The kernel really is misbehaving.  The best that
might be hoped for would be to recognize the kernel and platform and
skip the test.  But leaving this as a failure would be a good nag for
people to upgrade because the kernel really does have this problem.

Bob