Firefox 7.0.1-r1 fails to emerge [solved]

evoweiss · Last edited by evoweiss on Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:44 am; edited 1 time in total

Hi,

There appears to be a problem in emerging Firefox 7.0.1-r1. I've tried doing so twice already: the first time X/KDE was up and running and the second time I shutdown X/KDE, i.e., in the console. Still, the same problem happens. I have very sane gcc flags, so I don't think it's that.

My emerge output is as follows:

Chiitoo · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:25 am Post subject:

Which versions of Firefox have you been compiling in the past?

At some point, can't remember right now at which version, I think it changed quite a bit so that it can indeed take a lot of memory. Even with 2 GiB of RAM I would get slowdowns (it used it all and started swapping, too), at least I think it was Firefox, but for me it was temporary anyways because I had went down from 4 GiB to 2 due to the other stick failing and now I'm at 12...or wait, 8 right now.

Either way, what is your MAKEOPTS="-j" set to? I could reduce the amount or memory used by big compilations by reducing mine from 7 to 4 to have it go through nicely. There are other methods of reducing the RAM use but they do escape me at this time, and I would need to go look for certain threads for them, I'm sure someone has some ideas to share before I find them.

Another thing would be increasing the swap size, if possible, since if I am reading it right, it was using it all there...
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evoweiss · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 11:04 am Post subject:

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 11:13 am Post subject:

What is your swap space size? Lowering the MAKEOPTS value is definitely the first thing to try.

- John
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evoweiss · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 11:29 am Post subject:

Hi there,

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 12:11 pm Post subject:

Yes, even lower: try "-j1". Also try removing "-pipe" from your CFLAGS. Just to make sure I'm interpreting your swap space number correctly, could you post the output of

evoweiss · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 12:15 pm Post subject:

evoweiss · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 2:56 pm Post subject:

Hi,

Using -j1 did not do the trick. Again, the emerge failed. Any other recommendations?

Best,

Alex

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 3:49 pm Post subject:

You're going to have to deal with your swap space. With only half a gig, it's just inadequate. What filesystems do you use? (I ask this so I can propose tools to move and resize your partitions.)

- John
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evoweiss · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 4:12 pm Post subject:

Hi there,

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 4:18 pm Post subject:

Just to be clear, the error message you typically get when you run out of tmpfs is the abstruse "Bus error". Are you getting that? If not, then we're on the right track with working on increasing the size of your swap space.

- John
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evoweiss · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 4:20 pm Post subject:

Hi,

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 4:23 pm Post subject:

I believe it'll be in the /var/log/portage output for the failed ebuild. Check there too.

- John
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evoweiss · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 4:32 pm Post subject:

nlsa8z6zoz7lyih3ap · Guru Joined: 25 Sep 2007 Posts: 388 Location: Canada

evoweiss · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 8:56 pm Post subject:

Aiken · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:54 pm Post subject:

For sane values of X, playing with make -jX should not make a lot of difference. The problem is how much ram the linking part of build takes. Ld uses a lot of ram when linking firefox and thunderbird.

2GHz laptop with 1 gig of ram and 2.5 gig of swap. Building firefox and watching top. I went and did other things after top was reporting VIRT/RES 1007/779 for ld with 784 meg of swap in use and no end in sight. The hd light is on permanently and ld was hitting an amazing 3% cpu with the other 97% waiting on io.

After 81 minutes it finally finished. Largest amount of swap used was 939 meg. I can not see that working with a system that has 512 meg + 512 meg of swap.
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Chiitoo · Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2011 2:27 am Post subject:

Yeah, I think 3.6 or so (stable anyways) was around the last 'small' compile job for it if I remember right.
I'm quite confident that once you get some more of either RAM or/and SWAP you'll be fine. ^^
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evoweiss · Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:42 am Post subject:

Hi all,

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 8:29 am Post subject:

I had a similar issue and found that one needs about 1.5GB of virtual (physical + swap) RAM to complete building firefox7 - all due to the link stage at the end where it links all the compiled binaries together. To get to the fail state faster, I've noticed with distcc or with multiple cores, using -j6 doesn't seem to trigger the OOM issue, it's just the final linker phase that eats up so much memory.

Not sure if it matters with PGO or not, I left it on since a snappy browser is good too.

Here's what I found so far, all machines running X11/Gnome while building except where marked:

384MB Physical + 384MB swap : FAIL
384MB Physical + 384MB swap + 512MB swap : FAIL
384MB Physical + 384MB swap + 1GB swap (and killed X11/Gnome): pass
1GB physical + 0 swap : FAIL
1GB physical + 512MB swap: pass
2GB physical + 1GB swap + tmpfs portage build: FAIL (disabling tmpfs build was solution)
4GB physical + 512MB swap + tmpfs portage build: pass

Hope this helps anyone who wants to build firefox, and I suspect firefox8 will have the same issue and will need to do the same dance once more...

Now why didn't I just ~x86 and build firefox 8 anyway....
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