Re: coreutils-6.6 check failures on Itanium Linux

[Jim Meyering]

address@hidden (Bob Proulx) wrote:
> 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.

Yes, but the code that decides whether to skip the test should know
whether there is a version of linux-2.4.x for which the bug is fixed.

I guess you don't have access to an ia64 system with 2.4.X, 20 <= X ?