Package: base
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system

Dear Maintainer,

I need to boot a linux system on my old 486 to access the parallel
port to do some JTAG debugging.

I use my recent PC as a NFS root server.
I ran:
  debootstrap --arch=i386 stable /tmp/debian.stable
  debootstrap --arch=i386 testing /tmp/debian.testing
  debootstrap --arch=i386 unstable /tmp/debian.unstable
And served those directories to the 486, the one after the other.

Debian stable is working.
Debian testing is not.
Debian unstable is not.

Running "ls" crashes with "illegal instruction".
I found out that the illegal instruction is "cpuid" (this one
does not exist on 486 PC) which is in libpthread.so, function
__get_cpu_features.

Why is that called? I don't know. It should not.

I tried to recompile the whole gnu libc beast to not include that
function, but failed. I skip the details, I surely did something
wrong. And I don't have much time nor energy for that thing.

So I report the problem to you, just in case you plan to turn
testing into stable, because that would mean that debian will
not work on 486 PC anymore.

Maybe someone somewhere knows what to do and cares enough to
fix things. My bet is that the gnu libc thinks it will run
on at least a 586 and includes code for such computer. Is it
something in the configure of libc? Is it something with your
configuration of gcc (I see include/cpuid.h down in /usr/lib/gcc,
I suspect it should not be here, but I really don't know).
Well, I don't know.

In any case, please don't turn current testing into stable. That
would mean no more debian on 486.

In the future, if you think you fixed this problem, let me know so
I can try with my 486. (Why do some neurons up in my brain shoot
high levels of dopamine and serotonin when I read that previous
sentence, I don't know.)

Anyway, so be it. I did my part.

The following "system information" is from my recent PC and is
unrelated to the 486 at all, left here because, hum, why not.

Regards,
Cédric.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.14-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash


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