OpenBSD Journal

Another i386 Flag Day

Contributed by jose on from the i386-holidays dept.

Seen earlier today on the tech mailing list in this message : 


From: Theo de Raadt (deraadtcvs.openbsd.org)
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 12:50:55 CDT

when we designed the i386 W^X stuff, dale and i made a little mistake.

there's a better way which I call 512m high program mapping. anyways,
the result of this is that people need to re-upgrade if they are
running i386 snap, to a new i386 snap that goes out soon. the binary
file format has changed again, and not all old binaries will run.

so you can do this with new /bsd.rd, boot it, and upgrade.

that's going out the door today.
Hurray for the bleeding edge. Time for yet another download and upgrade.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Hey..much better to change the format now =) One of the things I like about OBSD is that the breaking of compatibility with previous versions (or snapshots) is not taboo...at least when gains can be made.

    Comments

    1. By mirabile () mirabile@bsdcow.net on http://MirBSD.BSDadvocacy.org/

      Upgrading by souce is possible, you just haveto disable W^X, rebuild binutils, ld.so, the
      entire userland, and then get a kernel with
      the final vmparams.h

  2. By Alejandro Belluscio () b a l d u s i@NOy a h o oSPAM.c o m on mailto:b a l d u s i@NOy a h o oSPAM.c o m

    In a follow up http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-tech&m=105216246825100&w=2 Theo said:
    > What is the main difference between the old and the new binary file
    > format?

    3.3
    a.out

    Last week:

    ELF
    executable mapped at around 0
    data segments for each module maps 1GB higher

    ~0 main program code
    .. gap
    512M ld.so code
    libc code
    1G main program data
    ... gap for MAXDSIZ of 512
    1.5G ld.so data
    libc data

    new:

    ~0 ld.so code
    libc code
    ...
    512-64M main program code
    ...
    1G ld.so code
    libc code
    ...
    1.5G-64M main program data
    ... MAXDSIZ can now be much larger

    this is better.

    Comments

    1. By Eduardo Alvarenga () eduardo at thrx dot dyndns dot org on mailto:eduardo at thrx dot dyndns dot org

      The only thing that bothers me is that I'll have to rebuild almost all packages I've suffered to rebuild in my first ELF upgrade...

      Just KDE will take about +2 days to complete... AGAIN!

      Comments

      1. By Peter Valchev () pvalchev@openbsd.org on mailto:pvalchev@openbsd.org

        Don't be a whiner, use the packages - that's what they are for. Or else, don't complain!

      2. By Blake () funkboy at two one one two dot net on mailto:funkboy at two one one two dot net

        Usually most packages are available in the snapshots. If not just wait a few days and they will be...

  3. By Anonymous Coward () on

    hopefully the servers arent jammed when I go to download the snapshot..

    Comments

    1. By Jedi/Sector One () j@pureftpd.org on http://www.pureftpd.org/

      Unfortunately, ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/ is slow like hell and all mirrors are not up to date.

  4. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Does this mean that us -stable users need to wait till the next release before we can make use of this?

    Comments

    1. By Jedi/Sector One () j@pureftpd.org on http://www.pureftpd.org/

      Definitely. As important changes are happening on -current, it's way safer to stick with -stable yet, and these changes are unlikely to be backported to 3.3 -stable. It's better to just wait for 3.4 when they will be stable enough for production use.

  5. By Darren () darren@dazdaz.NOSPAMM.org on mailto:darren@dazdaz.NOSPAMM.org

    It may be annoying but I also like the fact it's not taboo. Can you imagine the shit storm if this happened on a different platform (nameless).

    Admit the mistake and move on, good leadership there.

    Regards

    Comments

    1. By Kay () on

      100% agree

  6. By Anonymous Coward () on

    trying to upgrade from a March 27th snapshot. However,the bootloader doesn't seem to load the new May 7th bsd.rd.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      use a floppy to do the upgrade. after that bsd.rd will work for future upgrades.

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