Stop building 389-ds-base on i686

Summary

389-ds-base does not work properly on i686 hardware in regards to atomic types.

Owner

Name: Mark Reynolds
Email: mreynolds@redhat.com
Release notes owner:
Product: 389-ds-base. FreeIPA, slapi-nis
Responsible WG:

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 28
Last updated: 2018-03-29
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
https://pagure.io/releng/issue/7412

Detailed Description

389-ds project have found an issue which causes system instability on all versions of 1.4.x of the server on i686 platform. This is a hardware limitation of the platform related to how we consume atomic types. Our testing has shown that in i686 the atomic counters can have unpredictable values/behaviour. We use atomic counters all over the code base, and it many critical objects. This may lead to thread unsafety and other serious issues.

There is more detail in this bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1544386

Here is a bug snippet from the engineer who originally found the problem and did the all the investigation work (who is also not at Red Hat any more):

In libc there are a number of __atomic_* types that promise that "They perform atomic manipulations of the data, falling back to a mutex in the case that a native cpu atomic can not be used". On 32bit platforms this fallback does *not* occur correctly, meaning that either the lower or upper half only is atomically updated. This is due to variable alignment not being correctly emited by gcc, meaning we would have to then align every data that uses this.

This was discovered due to expansion of our testing capability of the C code base - a server stress test showed that counters could become wildly inaccurate.

Given we use atomics for reference counting in a number of objects, as well as for monitors, this can cause objects to leak, be freed early, or to report incorrect data...

Also impacted:

 - FreeIPA server will not be available on i686 due to this
 - slapi-nis set of plugins will not be available on i686 due to this
 - Upgrade of i686 instance of Fedora with FreeIPA server will not be possible without fully uninstalling FreeIPA replica

Benefit to Fedora

Stable release of 389-ds-base, FreeIPA, and slapi-nis on remaining architectures

Scope

Proposal owners:

This only requires a change to spec file to exclude i686

Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release engineering: #Releng issue number (a check of an impact with Release Engineering is needed)
- List of deliverables: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)