Re: make 3.81 + i386-pc-interix* parallelism problem, and "write error"

[Tim Murphy]

Hi,

I'm not a maintainer or anything but I have hacked around in the bit
of code that implements the job-server.  It's complicated and in my
case I realised that I actually didn't want it at all so I compiled
make without it.

Do you really need it? Do you use sub-makes (i.e. do you have
makefiles that call make again on other makefiles)?

I might be proposing a huge effort for you and you might not be
compiling code that you can change at will, but if not then you could
try using include to compose a big makefile rather than using
sub-makes.

This brings its own complexities but it is pretty cool because it
represents the whole dependency tree properly and it sort of allows
more parallelism.

Anyhow the alternative is to debug job handling for interix and work
out what's happening.  It could be some kind of issue with make
noticing that some job has finished, or something to do with the job
server blocking or just a bit of odd logic for interix.  It's not easy
to debug this without having the os and a debugger in front of you.

Regards,

Tim



2009/5/6 Markus Duft <address@hidden>:
> On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 07:06 +0100, Markus Duft wrote:
>> On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 17:56 +0100, Markus Duft wrote:
>> > Hi!
>>
>> ping...
>
> ping ping.... at least a comment on this would be cool... don't leave me
> in the dark! i think my report is quite detailed, and not one of the
> "make is broken - fix it" ...
>
>>
>> >
>> > I'm running make on x86 interix (SFU/SUA). All works like a charm, except
>> > for occasional problems with multi-core machines (I'm not sure if the same
>> > problems would occur on single cores too...).
>> >
>> > I'm seeing two different problems, the "bader" one being a jobserver token
>> > leak. Sometimes make exits with messages like this:
>> >
>> >     make: INTERNAL: Exiting with 3 jobserver tokens available; should be
>> > 2!
>> >
>> > But much worse is the case where make simply hangs, and seems to be out of
>> > jobserver tokens! Is this a known problem? I tried the patch from [1], but
>> > that didn't make any difference.
>> >
>> > Also I found a patch against 3.80, adding the jobserver_tokens global
>> > variable, so I assume that one has been incorporated into 3.81, since this
>> > variable already exists... (?).
>> >
>> > I attached the output of this command and the corresponding .diff file:
>> >     while ( cd tests && perl ./run_make_tests.pl features/parallelism
>> > -make ../make -debug -verbose ); do echo ...; done > xx 2>&1 &
>> >
>> > the test-1 log is seemingly another problem, which occurred while I tried 
>> > to
>> > faster provocate the error I'm reporting here by putting my 2 core AMD CPU
>> > under heavy load. Ugh... another one :(
>> >
>> > FYI I attached the config.log too, so you can identify potential issues
>> > caused by assumptions which may be wrong for interix.
>> >
>> > [1] http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?18124
>> >
>> > ----
>> >
>> > Now for the second problem, which is far easier to work around: Again only
>> > occasionally I'm getting "make[N]: write error". After
>> > R[eading]T[he]F[ine]S[source] I found out that ferror(stdout) triggers this
>> > message. Strange... seems like there was an error writing to stdout..? or
>> > could this point to an error writing to the jobserver fds?
>> >
>> > I worked around the problem for now by simply not exiting on this error,
>> > since it's not too critical for me if a line in the output is missing or
>> > something like that. Also since it's only occasionally, I can simple do 
>> > make
>> > again, If I really need all the output.
>> >
>> > BTW I never noticed missing output when I got "write error", but output
>> > tends to be kilometers long, so I could have overseen that :)
>> >
>> > Any ideas regarding those two?
>> >
>> > P.S.: I just noticed that the --enable-case-insensitive-file-system 
>> > (interix
>> > is insensitive, as it uses window's fs') is win32 only as-is, since it uses
>> > strcmpi. Attached is a patch fixing this for interix. Maybe this fixes for
>> > this feature for mac osx too (is there support for max osx yet?).
>> >
>> > Thanks in advance, Cheers,
>> > Markus Duft
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Bug-make mailing list
>> > address@hidden
>> > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
>>
>>
>>
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