Re: [gentoo-amd64] Problems compiling on Sun Java workstation with dual Opterons.

[Marco Matthies]

Hi, i've never experienced the same problem nor do I have a dual Opteron 
setup, but I'll try to help:

Nestor Camacho III wrote:
> It would just stop compiling. Would not freeze, I was able to do
> anything else, but it would just stop processing what it was currently
> compiling. When I  alt f2 into another window and do a top, I would see
> that the sh process was at 99%, and had been running for a long time. If
> I do a kill -HUP, on the process things would continue... but I can't
> imgaine that his is a fix for the problem.

Seems like an infinite loop perhaps, but might as well be something 
else... As always, it might be software or hardware :)

Do these problems reliably show up with a particular ebuild? You should 
be able to tell which ebuild it was by looking at the end of 
/var/log/emerge.log -- if yes, it might be the fault of that ebuild and 
it would be interesting to know if you can reliably cause it to spin 
forever.

If not it would probably have to be kernel and/or hardware (unless 
somehow the ebuild is behaving non-deterministically). Anything special 
noted in the output of dmesg or /var/log/messages that might indicate 
faulty hardware (for example, memory)? Though hardware failure can have 
lots of reasons (memory, psu, bad/dying capacitors). You might perhaps 
want to try a few nights of memtest on it. I also don't know what 
problems bad sectors on a hdd could cause for an ebuild (maybe something 
like trying to create a file and always failing?).

> Is there anyone out there that has had this problem?

I also vaguely remember seeing some bugs on the kernel.org bugzilla that 
were about smp-kernels on opterons having strange random segfaults (due 
to apparently some small error in their tlb). I don't know if the fixes 
have already been folded into the current gentoo and vanilla kernels or 
if your processor is actually affected (btw, which kernel are you 
running?). Maybe someone who is running smp can comment?

>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> *21166 root      25   0  4232  428  340 R 99.4  0.0 827:12.92 sh*
> 21278 jedi      16   0  188m  67m  12m S  2.0  3.3   0:11.35 python

I'm a bit puzzled by those two lines, did you run emerge as a regular 
user (seems like it or is that python process something else)? I don't 
really know how good running emerge is supposed to work when not being 
run as root.

Good luck,
Marco
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