puzzled by Sun patch instructions
2007-12-25 7:26:00
couple of weekd ago. A Sun engineer had offered to look into this and
I was waiting for his answer, but it never came.......
The question:
I got a couple of patches from Sun and I am a little confused by the
presence of *different* files for the sun4 and sun4c architectures.
For instance, patch 100311-01 (a new version of restore) comes with
sun4/restore and sun4c/restore, which are binary *different*, both to
be applied to /usr/etc/restore.
This puzzles me: in a mixed environment of sun4 and sun4c, all sharing
the same /usr partition, which restore should I use? I can understand
kvm differences, but what about "normal" files? This is not the only
patch like this, see also 100305 for something similar...
The consensum seems to be that Sun has screwed up...
The best answer for the differences in the restore copies of patch
1003111 is from Mike Sullivan:
I don't have any authoritative information, but I don't think there is
any real difference between the sun4 and sun4c files. "cmp -l" shows
that the only differences are in the last 624 bytes. The sun4 version
has some SCCS ids ("@(#)filename"), whereas the sun4c version contains
zeros. I suspect the sun4 just contains some uninitialized garbage
beyond the end of the real program (demand paged executable files are
always a multiple of 4k bytes). I have no idea why Sun built restore
separately for each kvm architecture. Note that they also built
separate sun3 and sun3x executables that are identical. Probably the
person who built the patch didn't know what he was doing. Judging from
the version numbers of some of the patches, it is clear that Sun
doesn't always get them right the first time (or the second time, or the
seventh time... :-).
As for patch 100305-05, more than one person suggested to get the -06
version which has only one copy of lpd.
In general, assuming the patch is good (:-)) I can suggest one way of
"fixing" this weirdness in other patches when "real" differences
exist: use symbolic links. For instance, you could have
/usr/etc/restore pointing to ../kvm/restore
Thanks to:
jfy@cis.ksu.edu (Joseph F. Young)
kevins%Aus@sun.com (Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child})
macphed@dvinci.usask.ca (Ian MacPhedran)
john@mlb.semi.harris.com (John M. Blasik)
tellab5!balr!vpnet!trdlnk!mike@delta.eecs.nwu.edu (Michael Sullivan)
Leonardo C. Topa
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room E25-506
45 Carleton Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
internet: lct@ai.mit.edu
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