Re: PATCH: allow 2.6 to build on old old setups

From: Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@csd.uu.se>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	torvalds@osdl.org
Subject: Re: PATCH: allow 2.6 to build on old old setups
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 15:28:38 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <16165.9478.694732.636734@gargle.gargle.HOWL> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1059391858.15438.14.camel@dhcp22.swansea.linux.org.uk>

Alan Cox writes:
 > On Llu, 2003-07-28 at 02:52, David S. Miller wrote:
 > > >  		    info->hdr->e_machine == EM_SPARCV9) {
 > > >  			/* Ignore register directives. */
 > > >  			if (ELF_ST_TYPE(sym->st_info) == STT_REGISTER)
 > > >  				break;
 > > >  		}
 > > > +#endif
 > > 
 > > This change is wrong.
 > > 
 > > If you're going to do this, it's much better to define it to the
 > > correct value in this case (which is decimal '13').
 > 
 > Its sparc specific stuff so presumably all sparc stuff had the register
 > ?. I can change and resubmit though - no problem

The error is that modpost.c is compiled against the C library elf headers
instead of the kernel's own elf headers. My #ifndef patch is just a workaround
for a missing -Iinclude and possibly -nostdinc when modpost.c is compiled.

David's response to that was that I should update my C library headers
instead. This is doable, but kind of defeats the purpose of having test
machines with old user-spaces around in the first place.

Linus once said that Linux did its own offsetof() just to avoid relying
on a fully working user-space...