
Halo~ I ran into the following error while trying to run a binary generated by GHC 6.8.x on our production machines with a not-so-recent linux installed (kernel 2.6.9). $ ./restyscript restyscript: timer_create: Invalid argument Evan building a pure static-linking executable did not solve the problem. Then I downloaded the binary GHC 6.8.3 from haskell.org on that machine, but the ghc crashes as well: $ ghc Floating point exception My teammate chaos++ found that the last time precision argument passed to the timer_create function was just too big. Manually editing the binary executable (the restyscript file in the previous example) solved this issue completely, but, yeah, it's terribly hacky. So I decided to build a GHC 6.8.3 from source on that old system using GHC 6.4.2. Fortunately, the binary GHC 6.4.2 from haskell.org does work there. The newly-built GHC solves all the problem. No floating-point exception nor invalid argument for timer_create. I've put my binary distribution on my site here: http://agentzh.org/misc/ghc-6.8.3-i386-old-linux.tar.bz2 Hopefully it'll be useful for someone else ;) Not sure if it's worth putting to the official download page as well :) Ideally GHC should inspect the kernel version and timer_create support at *runtime*, rather compile-time. It'll make our lives much easier ;) Thanks! -agentzh