From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754022Ab2HMVBw (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:01:52 -0400 Received: from terminus.zytor.com ([198.137.202.10]:35574 "EHLO mail.zytor.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752072Ab2HMVBv (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:01:51 -0400 Message-ID: <50296B34.8090502@zytor.com> Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:01:40 -0700 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20120605 Thunderbird/13.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Cullen CC: Michal Marek , "linux-kbuild@vger.kernel.org" , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC] Fix "/usr/bin/xargs: rm: Argument list too long" during make distclean References: <502957D5.1070800@koe-americas.com> <502965BE.3070406@zytor.com> <502969FA.6010907@koe-americas.com> In-Reply-To: <502969FA.6010907@koe-americas.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 1.4.3 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 08/13/2012 01:56 PM, David Cullen wrote: >> >> That sounds like a bug in xargs... >> > > In my specific case, qemu-arm-static calls xargs (In fact, in my > cross chroot, qemu-arm-static is used to run every user mode process). > > Do you mean that qemu-arm-static is exposing a latent defect in xargs? > > Does qemu-arm-static steal some of the command line space that would > normally be available for xargs? If so, how would xargs figure out > this was happening and handle the problem? > I have no idea. Perhaps strace can help you see what is happening, I don't know. More likely it is qemu-arm-static that is broken and it is trying to enforce the old 128K limit that we used to have before 2.6.23. This could cause a mismatch between what sysconf(_SC_ARG_MAX) returns and what the actual limit is. Anyway, even more so the reason to reject this patch. -hpa