1. 16 Feb, 2013 1 commit
    • H. Peter Anvin's avatar
      kernel: Replace timeconst.pl with a bc script · 70730bca
      H. Peter Anvin authored
      
      bc is the standard tool for multi-precision arithmetic.  We switched
      to Perl because akpm reported a hard-to-reproduce build hang, which
      was very odd because affected and unaffected machines were all running
      the same version of GNU bc.
      
      Unfortunately switching to Perl required a really ugly "canning"
      mechanism to support Perl < 5.8 installations lacking the Math::BigInt
      module.
      
      It was recently pointed out to me that some very old versions of GNU
      make had problems with pipes in subshells, which was indeed the
      construct used in the Makefile rules in that version of the patch;
      Perl didn't need it so switching to Perl fixed the problem for
      unrelated reasons.  With the problem (hopefully) root-caused, we can
      switch back to bc and do the arbitrary-precision arithmetic naturally.
      Signed-off-by: default avatarH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
      Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
      Acked-by: default avatarSam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarMichal Marek <mmarek@suse.cz>
      70730bca