The clue to build ppc64 RPM’s

Remember, I talked about building RPM’s on SLES10SP2 on ppc64 ? Well, turns out I was rather stupid .. and it was rather simple (don’t ask me why I didn’t think of that). I tried asking solar, I used Google (apparently with the wrong search parameters), nothing though. Not a clue.

Today it bugged me again, so I used Google again. This time with “ppc64 suse rpmbuild“, and guess what I saw within the preview of the second hit ..

And here I thought I was missing something, turns out I was really stupid though .. *shrug* Building stuff like nagios works with that just fine ..

Update: or not. It worked only a single time and is broken ever since again. Guess I’m gonna reload the box on Tuesday.

Building RPMs on SLES10SP2-ppc64

Well, it turns out that building stuff on ppc64 is a *real* pain in the ass, at least on anything SUSE related. I do have to tweak every damn spec to include this:

Otherwise, ld is gonna fail when linking, as it’s gonna try linking the generated 64bit code (-m64 is passed on via RPM_OPT_FLAGS to CFLAGS) as 32bit code, which ain’t gonna work at all …

On top of that, stuff ain’t building due to multiple problems (for example nagios and vim, cause ld is unable to find the fitting -lperl (for nagios) and -lXt (for vim)) as well as source errors …

EPIA fun

Well, as for replacing my current fileserver (which I seriously need to consider replacing), I’ll just pick up these things:

  • 3WARE 9550SXU-8LP (that’s 399,00€) plus riser card
  • VIA EPIA EK 8000EG (that’s 201,69€)
  • Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 1 GB DDR-400 (that’s 57,00€)
  • 4x Seagate ST31000340NS (that’s 279,00€ each – making a subtotal of 1.116,00€)

So after browsing some more for a replacement for my current fileserver, I’d like to share the latest stages with you people. Thanks to Mike (who mentioned that binutils-2.18* already does the LDFLAGS=”-Wl,-z,relro” part) I replaced it with “-Wl,-O1”. Same old place, there’s fresh stages … (and thanks again to Mike, with working util-linux-2.13-r2).

I also tried getting a Gentoo/Hardened stage for PowerPC working, but that fails as due to >glibc-2.3 needing =gcc-4*. Though luck ….

Oh, yeah. If anyone is looking for the specs, they are in my overlay.

stages

For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying to get some stages together the last few days. Thanks to solar and Brent, the ppc-stages are now coming along quite fast.

I haven’t really tested them yet, but for what it’s worth, you’ll find stages based on Saturday’s snapshot (that is 200780105 for those not smart enough to take a look at the calendar) here for the following profiles:

  • uclibc/ppc (normal/-softfloat)
  • uclibc/ppc/hardened
  • uclibc/x86
  • uclibc/x86/hardened
  • hardened/amd64
  • hardened/amd64/nomultilib
  • hardened/x86/2.6 (x86/i686)

Now remember, this isn’t *official* release material. This is just *MY* effort (for now) to provide current stages.

And just a side-note for those brewing their own (uClibc) soup: if you remerge system/world, you’ll have to keyword =sys-libs/uclibc.0.9.28.3-r2. Otherwise you’ll stumble on bug 195368, which is fixed thanks to solar, just not marked stable yet.