[Nix-dev] Re: Please update of stdenv-linux tarballs

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 10:39:24AM +0200, Peter Simons wrote:
> Hi Lluís, > 
>  > The new bootstrap-tools for i686 are built with glibc 2.12.1 built
>  > with gcc 4.3 [...].
> 
> is it really necessary to use the bleeding edge versions of everything
> for *bootstrapping*? These choices mean that it is impossible to install
> NixOS inside a CentOS 5 host OS, because their kernel doesn't work with
> glibc 2.12. 
Uhm... I wonder how we could deal with it.
One way is getting the stdenv bootstrap longer and longer, passing maybe
through multiple glibc and gcc versions. We already added a new binutils stage
in the middle to avoid rebuilding i686-linux binutils recently. At the end I
rebuilt them though.

The problem with the CentOS 5 kernel should be related to some specific feature
of the new glibc 2.12 version. Do you know what is it specifically? Maybe we
could have some 'bleeding-edge' but generically-built enough bootstrap-tools if
we knew the details.

glibc 2.12 needs gcc 4.4 to build its SSE code because otherwise it builds it
with bad stack alignment (resulting in SIGBUS inside usual libc functions). We
can work around that only through patching.

Thank you,
Lluís.