2.1.37 trampoline.S still fails. What gives?

George H Byrkit (ghbyrkit@concentric.net)
Wed, 14 May 1997 13:42:55 -0400

OK, I'm not a clueless newbie, but I feel like one with this problem.
I've mentioned it twice (once on linux.dev.kernel which seems to be dead
at my end. Is it still active? I want to tell my ISP..., once on here.
) Someone else has mentioned the problem once also.

Here's the recap.

When compiling any version of 2.1.37 (from pre-4 up to and including the
official release, never tried versions pre-[123]), the assembly of the
temporary file generated from linux/arch/i386/kernel/trampoline.S fails
on the line
.long gdt-0xC0000000
with the message that the result won't fit in 4 bytes. At this point
gdt has the value zero. Going back to the 2.1.36 code, I see that this
line was different, and gdt was located right after this line of code.

So what's wrong with this calculation? why is the value of gdt zero
when it seemingly should be above 0xC0000000? I've got gcc/g++ 2.7.2.1,
ld_so 1.8.10, binutils 2.8.0.3, and all kind of other bleeding edge
stuff.

So why are all of you able to build a SMP version of the kernel when I
can't even build the default build (just run menuconfig and exit with
the default choices), let alone build what I could in 2.1.36?

Regards (desperately waiting...)
George Byrkit