Alpha is seriously broken

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 4:58 PM +0300 8/20/04, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
>On Fri, Aug 20, 2004, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
>  > Ruslan Ermilov <ru at freebsd.org> writes:
>>  > I think there's no emergency plan other than to reinstall "base"
>>  > on these systems from some older snapshot?
>>
>  > cross-compile on a different machine in the cluster, copy over
>  > the new make(1), then use it to installworld over NFS.
>
>Only if this machine is also Alpha.  To tell you the truth, some bits
>produced by cross-compiles on different architectures are not ready
>for use on a native architecture.  This includes binary files such as
>fortune(6) .dat files, NLS catalogs, etc.  I haven't identified them
>all yet.

If this machine has been getting rebuilt frequently, then maybe you
can just boot up kernel.old and have a working machine.

If that does not work, and would a cross-compile work well-enough to
generate a new library (if the problem is a library), or a new kernel
(if the error is in the kernel).  Or maybe just generate dynamically-
linked versions of make & cc.  Even if cross-builds are not good
enough to do a complete buildworld, might they work well enough to
recover from this with less work than a complete reinstall?

On my sparc64 system, I have two sets of partitions, and every month
or so I dump/restore to duplicate my working partitions to the second
set (and change fstab automatically, so the second set boots right!).

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu