Re: Bug#802593: gcl: FTBFS on hurd-i386

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings, and thanks for following up on this!  Almost forgot about
that old post.

I suppose if this issue is intractable at the kernel level, we could
always emulate brk as we do on windows and macosx.  Not knowing where
the fragmentation occurs, its not clear this would get us true dynamic
probing of all the available memory at runtime which has proven so
helpful in optimizing gc performance.  If all else fails, we could just
hardcode a big allocation and make all instances run with that, as is
done on windows.  On the other hand, I'm loathe to put in the effort to
do this if brk can be fixed.  If you have any suggestions as to the best
path forward, that would be helpful.

Take care,

Svante Signell <svante.signell@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
> Cc: bug-hurd
>
> On Wed, 2015-10-21 at 10:57 -0400, Camm Maguire wrote:
>> Greetings, and thanks for your note!  Patch will be included in next
>> upload.
>> 
>> Do you work on Hurd?  There are several FTBFS errors in gcl dependencies
>> (maxima,hol88,axiom,acl2) which I have been unable to resolve and appear
>> to point to bugs in system libraries (as did the old FTBFS for gcl in
>> which calls to system() would fail.)  The general symptom appears to be
>> a lockup of some sort in the rpc system (see maxima).  Can this be
>> fixed, or must it wait on deeper forthcoming fixes in the core Hurd
>> system libraries?
>
> All the above packages (except axiom) FTBFS, even with the latest gcl
> (2.6.12). The build of acl2 fails with an assertion on the MAX_BRK limit
> for mini-proveall, defined in gcl/h/386-gnu.h. Removing that limitation
> makes the build fail earlier. Running your test program at
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2013/07/msg00038.html
> on a recent kernel gives an even lower limit for memory fragmentation.
> 0x70000000 fails now, and I used 0x6b000000 in the latest build. The
> acl2 assertion still happens. Builds of maxima, hol88 will be tried
> next.
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Camm Maguire                                        camm@maguirefamily.org
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah