[Dovecot] Dovecot 2.0.8 Linux 2.6.12.6-arm1 armv5tejl Segmentation fault

[Stephen Feyrer]

Hi Stan,

On Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:28:16 -0000, Stan Hoeppner <stan at hardwarefreak.com>  
wrote:

> Stephen Feyrer put forth on 1/6/2011 11:20 AM:
>> Hi Stan,

> Hi Stephen.

>>>> # OS: Linux 2.6.12.6-arm1 armv5tejl

>>> Stephen, just curious:

>> Curiosity should be be encouraged, oddly though, this is best achieved
>> with answers.

> Always. :)

[snip]

>> I hope this was informative.

> Yes, very.  So, in summary, I guess one could say that working in the
> embedded world, with a non x86 platform, and a less than fully supported
> OS distro, can often be very different, and more difficult, than working
> in the "normal" x86 world.

> Given the difficulties with managing optware, have you considered
> switching to emdebian?  Or is the problem not optware per se, but the
> package management process for embedded systems in general?  It appears
> that no matter which embedded OS option you choose, there is a lot of
> manual work involved.

I had thought of embedded Gentoo, that's only because its the distro on my  
desktop machine.  Also, the optware distribution targets my (now older)  
QNAP NAS.  I may be wrong but one of the advantages of optware is that it  
retains the vendors original look and feel.  Neither do you need to  
re-invent functionality.

> Have you tried a standard distro such as Debian but with a minimal
> install?  I have such Debian Lenny servers with a memory footprint of
> less than 64MB, including Postfix and Dovecot, and a / filesystem of
> less than 1GB.  Is your arm platform RAM limited or storage limited, or
> both?

The major limit at the moment is the support of things like bin-utils and  
libtool and autoconf any one of these could be the cause of my problem.  I  
have tried to use what is the native cross compile environment on my  
desktop to build Dovecot this was more than a year ago, targeting the  
current kernel, glibc and other environmental components, much to no avail.

> Take a look at Emdebian and regular Debian w/ a minimal install.  Both
> support arm and armel platforms.  The standard Debian arm install can be
> performed via http using either a tiny CD/DVD image or a USB flash
> drive.  The Emdebian install is obviously more complicated, likely
> similar to optware.  Although emdebian has a large developer community
> backing it.

> http://www.emdebian.org/

> "Prebuilt toolchains to build for arm, armel, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel,
> powerpc, s390 and sparc using a variety of gcc-3.3, gcc-3.4, gcc-4.0,
> gcc-4.1, gcc-4.2, gcc-4.3 and gcc-4.4 compilers."

> http://tuxonomy.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/debian-minimal-install-of-a-base-system-lenny-aka-5-0/

> http://www.debian.org

> Standard Debian (Lenny) doesn't offer Dovecot 2.0, and frankly this is
> because it's just not stable enough--still too many patches on a regular
> bases.  Via the backports repository you have access to the latest 1.2.x
> series, or a patch level behind.  Currently 1.2.15 is available, and
> IIRC the latest is 1.2.16.  I'm still running 1.2.15 and have had no
> issues with it, or the 5 prior point releases back to 1.2.11.  YMMV.

I will certainly read up on these tools.  Thank you for point them out to  
me.  If Dovecot 2.0 proves too difficult to get working, I'll resort to  
1.2.16.


--
Kind regards

Stephen.