Bug 72200 – Pine 4.60 build dies on compilation of filter.c due to a bug causing gcc to use lots of RAM and refusing to go to swap.

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Michael 2004-11-23 01:14:26 UTC]

When running emerge pine, and attempting to build Pine 4.60,
the build fails due to lack of RAM.  It requires approxamately 512MB (or
more) to build.  This bug has been acknowledged at the UW website and
they have released a fix which should probably be put into the portage.
Users without lots of RAM will more likely then not experience this often,
as gcc appears to not like to touch the swap space.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot Linux with 128 MB of RAM (if you have more, use mem=128M)
2. 'emerge pine'
3. Watch it fail on filter.c.

Actual Results:  
When gcc encounters filter.c, it's memory usage will climb continously until
it reaches an amount where all free RAM is used.  In the process of requiring
more memory, the Linux kernel will swap applications to swap-space, freeing
as much as it can (down to about 10MB short of all system RAM, in this case).
After it fails to fulfill the RAM requirements of gcc using this method, it
starts killing things it can't swap to the swap space.  When this fails, it
kills the apparently rogue gcc.  This is a bug with filter.c - see PINE website
for information on that.

Expected Results:  
Compiled successfully.  The appropriate fix in this case is to patch
filter.c (which I have not the experience to do) or to upgrade to PINE 4.61
in the portage tree.

Information from 'emerge info' not relevant.

System memory is not faulty, was tested for 48+ hours using memtest86.
System has a 550MHz PIII and 128MB of RAM with 1 GB of swap space.

[Comment 1 Tuan Van (RETIRED) 2004-11-23 10:00:15 UTC]

4.61 aready in portage.

[Comment 2 Andrej Kacian (RETIRED) 2004-11-23 10:07:13 UTC]

Should we pull 4.60 from portage?

[Comment 3 Tuan Van (RETIRED) 2004-11-23 10:29:24 UTC]

not until we have these keyword in 4.61: ppc x86 sparc amd64.
Andrej, if you could, please file bugs assign to those arches asking for stable keywords.

[Comment 4 Andrej Kacian (RETIRED) 2004-11-23 10:32:46 UTC]

I can make x86 stable, I will file a bug for the rest.

[Comment 5 Andrej Kacian (RETIRED) 2004-11-26 02:19:59 UTC]

Ok, 4.61-r2 stabilized for all arches 4.60 is stable for, so I'm pulling everything below 4.61-r2. I also did a cleanup in files/ dir by removing no longer used patches.

Thanks for reporting, Michael.

[Comment 6 Michael 2004-12-01 12:05:51 UTC]

No problem, andrej.  I failed to notice the slew of e-mail generated by this bug because I haven't checked this inbox for a few days, and probably should've piped up when I found out that 4.61 worked as expected on x86, since that's what I've been using for a while now :-D.  Yay for die-hard PINE fans!  It's rather unfortunate that the other bugs on this issue failed to pinpoint WHY this behavior was exhibited, and I haven't seen or checked (yet) to see if those were marked resolved, but they probably should be now since 4.61 was marked stable.  Good day.