On Fri, 2025-06-13 at 22:29 +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote: > I think quite a bit more binaries than just Glibc are needed for Debian > upgrade tooling to work, but OK.
I have already performed tests with 4 bytes alignment, same applies to the Gentoo developers. I assume you have done your tests as well so far? What are your results? > As to other potential issues... > > I assume there are no m68k port packages with closed source executable > code (FW) [1], like the other architectures (esp. x86) have & need, and > that any code intended to work also on non-m68k platform, should be fine > with 4-byte alignment. > > But what about m68k specific C/C++ and assembly code that may hard-code > 2-byte alignment assumptions; is there any tooling to detect (potential) > alignment issues in those? Here's a list of almost 6000 software packages that build fine on m68k with 4 bytes alignment: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/m68k/9.0_2023Q4/All/ > Or is the plan just to rely on packages' self-tests to reveal issues, > and then track them down from there? I will fix these problems as they occur meaning I will just do what I did before with the 2 bytes alignment failures. > [1] Are sources for "bootstra.tos" & "amiboot" anywhere, in case they > need updates: > https://wiki.debian.org/M68k/Installing > https://people.debian.org/~wouter/d-i/images/20130502-06:51/tools/atari/ > https://people.debian.org/~wouter/d-i/images/20130502-06:51/tools/amiga/ > ? I don't think these would need to be updated but this can be tested. > > > Are there any statistics on how many Debian packages do (still) include > m68k assembly? I don't expect anything outside glibc, the kernel and GCC to use assembly on m68k. And even if, the fact that the NetBSD people don't have to patch everything to work with 4 bytes shows that there is nothing to worry about. I am planning to rebuild and test the whole archive first anyway before actually making the switch. I'm also monitoring what the Gentoo folks are doing. > If that number is limited enough, it could help in getting other people > to review the assembly code for potential alignment issues... > > Glibc is likely on top of that list (but also most likely to be > alignment neutral): > glibc$ find -name '*.S' | grep m68k | wc -l > 25 > > As *BSD already uses 4-byte alignment, I assume that for packages > containing m68k assembly that do support / work also on *BSD in addition > to Linux, m68k asm code used on both should work fine, and one needs to > review only m68k asm that differs on Linux. Exactly my point. It works on NetBSD, so I'm not worried about Linux. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
