Re: gnumach crashing

[R. Steven Rainwater]

I'm still having no luck trying to get a working gnumach compiled from
CVS. I'll summarize where am to save reading over the thread again.

I'm working on a Debian GNU/Hurd system that works fine as far as I can
tell. It was installed from the K14 ISOs and then upgraded to the latest
unstable version.

I'm attempting to follow the gnumach build instructions here:

http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/microkernel/mach/gnumach/building/

which gives these steps:

1. cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/hurd co -r
gnumach-1-branch gnumach

2. cd gnumach

3. autoreconf --install  

4. cd .. (implied by 7)

5. mkdir gnumach-build

6. cd gnumach-build

7. ../gnumach/configure

8. make gnumach.gz

My last step is to rename gnumach.gz to gnumach-test.gz and move it to
the /boot directory. I have added grub menu items that let me select
starting it in single user or multi user modes.

The compile process appears to work and does run okay in single user
mode. But, when using the resulting gnumach kernel in multi user mode,
the system crashes and reboots at the first point where an application
tries set up or access the TCP/IP netoworking.

Thomas Schwinge suggested adding --enable-kdb to the configure step to
prevent the reboot. This revealed the following error message at the
time of the crash:

 zalloc: zone ipc ports exhausted

As a sanity checked, I used apt to retreived the Debian gnumach source
and built it. As expected, this results in a gnumach.gz file that
matches exactly the original one and on which I can boot and run the
system successfully. 

My next guess is that there must be a patch applied to the Debian
gnumach source that isn't in the CVS source. So I applied all the Debian
gnumach patches to the CVS source. They applied cleanly. I rebuilt the
kernel and got the same results - a crash on network access.

I'm guessing all that's left is a difference in the build process used
by dpkg-buildpackage vs the manual build instructions I'm following.
There's no question that the resulting files differ. The files size of
both the compressed and uncompressed gnumach file is different between
the Debian source and the CVS source. In part this appears to be because
the manual instructions leave out a step to strip the binary which is
included in the dpkg build process. That gets the file sizes closer but
there's still a difference. 

Any more suggestions on what I'm doing wrong? It's probably just another
configure options that needs to be added or something simple like that
but I'm out of ideas at this point.

-Steve