[Buildroot] Analysis of build failures

Thomas Petazzoni thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com
Sun Jun 15 10:42:16 UTC 2014


Dear Thomas De Schampheleire,

On Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:36:44 +0200, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:

> Could you clarify why we need a timeout in the first place? Have
> there been occurrences of builds that get stuck (in a loop or
> otherwise)? According to me, it doesn't matter that a build takes ten
> hours for a given configuration, as long as it progresses and doesn't
> get stuck...

The reason a timeout was introduced is because there used to be an old
PowerPC toolchain in which 'ld' had a bug, and this bug caused ld to
enter an infinite loop, consuming 100% of the CPU forever, when linking
a specific piece of code. There have been occurrences where my build
server has remained stuck for several days in this infinite loop before
I realized that the builds were no longer occurring, and figured out
what was going on.

I don't think we still have this toolchain tested in the current
configurations, but the timeout mechanism has remained in place, and I
believe it's still possible to have similar issues in the future.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com


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