I’ve tried to rebuild the latest Debian packages of Mozilla and Firefox with my jsarena pointer arithmetic fix on ppc32/ppc64 today. Rebuilding worked fine with older versions but this time it failed because the makefiles identified my G5 as an i386 box! The makefiles use uname -m to determine the CPU type, there’s no code to handle ‘ppc64’ and the default is ‘x86’.

As my old work-around (providing a uname command that returns ‘ppc’) didn’t work anymore, this forced me to look at the root cause of the problem.

I’ve finally found two issues with the PER_LINUX32 personality:

• uname(2) didn’t respect PER_LINUX32
• Child processes didn’t inherit PER_LINUX32

This patch for 2.6.12-rc1-mm4 fixes both issues:

$ uname -m
ppc64
$ linux32 uname -m
ppc
$ linux32 sh -c "uname -m"
ppc

Without the patch all three commands return ‘ppc64’.

The inotify API has been changed, watches are now added via the file’s fd. That makes the 32-bit compat patch pretty trivial:
inotify-0.21-compat.patch

March 18th, 2005: The patch has been integrated into inotify 0.21-2

My 32-bit compat patch for evdev has been integrated into Linux 2.6.11-mm3.

I’ve just installed the file alteration monitor Gamin. Its inotify support didn’t work because inotify didn’t provide the required compat ioctl(2) for my mixed 32/64-bit system.
Here’s a patch that adds the missing ioctl(2) to 2.6.11-mm2:
inotify-compat-2.6.11-mm2.patch

March 17th, 2005: Updated patch available here