Has anyone else came across this and know how to exploit this problem in Solaris 7? I checked a few places but couldn't find much info on the subject. -jake (the unfortunate owner of a 143mhz ultra1) ------------ cut from solaris 7 sparc boot (1m) man pages --------- 64-bit SPARC Booting UltraSPARC Systems Certain platforms may need a firmware upgrade to run the 64-bit kernel. See the Sun Hardware Platform Guide for details. If the 64-bit kernel packages are installed and boot detects that the platform needs a firmware upgrade to run 64-bit, boot displays a message on the console and chooses the 32-bit kernel as the default file instead. 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. The code sequence that exploits the problem is very unusual and is not likely to be generated by a compiler. Assembler code had to be specifically written to demonstrate the prob- lem. It is highly unlikely that a legitimate handwritten assembler routine would use this code sequence. Users willing to assume the risk that a user might acciden- tally or deliberately run a program that was designed to cause a processor to stall may choose to run the 64-bit ker- nel by modifying the boot policy file. Edit /platform/platform-name/boot.conf so that it contains an uncommented line with the variable named ALLOW_64BIT_KERNEL_ON_UltraSPARC_1_CPU set to the value true as shown in the example that follows: ALLOW_64BIT_KERNEL_ON_UltraSPARC_1_CPU=true -------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 15:20:39 PDT