> >Got a surprise when I finally installed the non-beta version of Solaris 7 >on my Ultra-2 today. It booted to 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit, claiming > my hardware defaulted to 32-bit mode. > > The message at boot time said to see the boot(1m) man page, so I > looked, and there it was at the bottom: > > On systems containing 200MHz or lower UltraSPARC-1 proces- > sors, it is possible for a user to run a 64-bit program > designed to exploit a problem that could cause a processor > to stall. Since 64-bit progams cannot run on the 32-bit > kernel, the 32-bit kernel is chosen as the default file on > these systems. This shouldn't come as a surprise, since Sun are talking openly about it in their Solaris 7 seminars for system administrators (which you _have_ attended, right?). The problem is restricted to older systems, and their advice was that if you were at all worried about this, you should run the 32- bit kernel for peace of mind. Later processors are unaffected. If they'd put the 64-bit kernel in by default, you'd criticise them for leaving a security hole in the system..... Paul. ------------------------------------------------------ Paul J. Murphy - Head of I.T. Gemini Research Ltd, 162 Science Park, Cambridge Phone: 01223 435305 Fax: 01223 435301
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 14:22:49 PDT