From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:42:16 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] Analysis of build failures In-Reply-To: <01b1dd01-35b7-40d8-bb70-56a33e20f1a6@email.android.com> References: <20140615063014.70ACF100EAC@stock.ovh.net> <20140615122040.6effbc93@free-electrons.com> <01b1dd01-35b7-40d8-bb70-56a33e20f1a6@email.android.com> Message-ID: <20140615124216.2c3c1428@free-electrons.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net 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