So I went and re-installed my ppc64 rap prefix. After some back and forth I finally reached the end successfully \o/
I have a few things to say but I decided to split this particular issue because it has wider implication. The OS is SuSE linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 and it has kernel 2.6.32. SP3 and SP4 have 3.0 and would also be affected I believe. 2.6.32 is also the kernel of redhat/centos 6 which is still in wide use. So rap tried to install glibc 2.25 which was still the highest version available at the time. Compile went apparently fine until the install stage. When glibc told me politely but firmly: FATAL KERNEL TOO OLD And looking back at the log, it was initially configured to use 2.6.32 as the oldest kernel but the configure script changed that to 3.10 (If I remember correctly) later during configuration. After masking 2.25 I did try 2.24, the message was not as clear, there was a “FATAL” but I don’t think my kernel got insulted that time but it was the same place. And configure again rewrote the required minimal kernel version supported. Masking 2.24 I got down to 2.23 which in the end worked (after some massaging more about that later). So message #1 if you have an older kernel (<3.10) the latest glibc available to you is 2.23. That probably should be in the wiki. The compiling actually didn’t go without problems. Courtesy of binutils-2.29.1. There was two issues: * http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2017-August/199812.html glibc 2.23 and 2.24 were affected by this issue, I think 2.25 was OK. glibc takes user patch from etc/portage/patches so adding this was easy. * an assembly bug specific to ppc that plagued all versions and apparently was spotted starting binutils-2.27.51. I can send a link to that one as well but it potentially just affects me unlike the first one. # message #2 if you are stuck with an older glibc, it may need patching to deal with newer binutils and possibly other toolchain elements. Cheers, François
