Dan Burcaw tracked this down on PPC yesterday and we discussed the problem in IRC. There's some kind of weird aliasing bug occuring in freetype, which causes mkfontscale to SIGILL on ppc64 and ppc, and SEGV on s390. Elliot reported the problem initially about 2 weeks ago in IRC as an mkfontscale bug, but we never dug into it because we were going to update to xorg-x11 anyway. The problem occurs on xorg now also, however if HasFreetype2 is set to NO in host.def then the problem does not occur. This is because the freetype included with X gets built and used instead, and X is built with -fno-strict-aliasing, which seems to bypass the problem. Since I'm trying very hard to get xorg-x11 built ASAP, and tree-ready, I didn't want to wait until tomorrow to bounce this off you, so I decided to update freetype myself for now to 2.1.7-3 with -fno-strict-aliasing added, in hopes that this will resolve the problem for us for now. I'll give you an update on wether this fix works or not tomorrow, and we can decide to keep it/revert it/fix it in some other way, etc.
I've reported this upstream with a tad bit more detail on where I think the bug exists. See the post to devel: http://www.freetype.org/pipermail/devel/2004-March/010293.html
Ok, the freetype 2.1.7-3 that I built in dist-fc2 with -fno-strict-aliasing, has been confirmed to resolve this issue now. xorg-x11 builds cleanly. This might also be a problem in Fedora Core 1, with freetype 2.1.4, as a test X build I did in the fc1 -scratch collinst failed in a similar way. Not important likely, unless we do an FC1/ppc release though, which seems unlikely at this point.
This bug shouldn't be closed until we investigate it and either file a GCC bug or an upstream freetype bug. (Dan Burcaw mailed freetype-devel about this but without a lot of detail (was the mail truncated?), and I doubt anybody will investigate.)
Please see also the thread in freetype-devel. [ft-devel] Bug on PowerPC: Illegal Intruction in FT_Get_Name_Index I have had exactly the same problems as you mentioned above. PPC32 platform (to be more precise: embedded Freescale mpc8540 processor, gcc-3.4-20050401, binutils 2.15.96, glibc-2.3.4). It's in a -works-for-me- status now. I also doubt if anybody will investigate this behaviour more closely. I am not a Font-Code-Writer at all, but let me know if I can assist.
I'm cleaning out bugzilla of bugs that I've filed over the last 3 years which are either fixed and/or I no longer wish to track. Closing bug as CURRENTRELEASE, as freetype is built properly in all OS releases to avoid this problem. If anyone is interested in fixing freetype's aliasing bugs, feel free to send patches to the freetype project, or to submit a bug to the freetype bug tracker. There does not appear to be any value to leaving the bug perpetually open in bugzilla though, as indicated in comment #4.
no-strict-aliasing does not seem to be necessary any longer.