"cannot execute" error

Question

Hi -
I know that you can get a "cannot execute" error when trying to run a SPARC binary on an x86 system or vice versa.
However, we have a customer reporting this error when running our SPARC binary on his SPARC system. Both systems are running Solaris 10, but have different processors and different Update levels.
The binary is a 32-bit:
starlic-admin: ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC32PLUS Version 1, V8+ Required,
built on our system, which is a SunBlade 1500 (UltraSPARC) system running Solaris 10 Update 7, I believe:
uname -a
SunOS host 5.10 Generic_139555-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-1500
The customer is using a Fujitsu-Siemens SPARC system with Solaris 10 Update 3 (as near as I can tell):
SunOS host1 5.10 Generic_125100-10 sun4us sparc FJSV,GPUZC-M
Should the difference in processors make a difference? Or the difference in Update levels? Is there some different way I should be building our binaries so they will run on the end user's system?
I am puzzled by the error - the customer also has a Solaris x86 machine (where he initially tried installing our software) so there is a possibility that he accidentally went back to the original machine, but I think that unlikely.

Answer 1

Using an older version of our product (built on Solaris 8 with a pretty old version of the Sun C/C++ compiler (Sun Studio 8) worked. Luckily there have been no major changes in our product, so it's OK for this customer to run an older version, but I'm still trying to figure this out for future support.
The old binaries are built as ELF 32-bit MSB dynamic lib SPARC Version 1.
I built hello.c on our Solaris 10 update 7 system in a bunch of ways (e.g. with xarch=v7, etc), and tried building both with the old compiler from Sun Studio 8 (which we still have installed) and with Sun Studio 12u1:
/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc hello.c -o oldv1
/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -xarch=v8plus hello.c -o oldv8plus
cc -xarch=v7 -o v7 hello.c
cc -xarch=v8 -o v8 hello.c
cc -xarch=generic -o generic hello.c
cc -xarch=sparc -o sparc hello.c
cc -xarch=v8plus -o v8plus hello.c
(oldv1: ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1)
( /usr/bin/cc -> /opt/sunstudio12.1/bin/cc)
and the customer gets the "can't execute" error for all of them - i.e. I can't figure out any way on our current system to build a binary that runs for this user.
So I'm thinking it's OS level rather than processor type. But I don't want to even suggest that the customer upgrade his OS unless I am 100% positive that it will resolve anything (and that it's the only solution).
Over in the HP-UX world, whenever there is an upgrade to a new version of the HP aCC compiler, there is a corresponding system patch for just the C and C++ runtimes - i.e. there is a single patch that you can specify in your end user system requirements. Perhaps there is something similar on Solaris? Guess it's time to dig deep into the documentation...