Build problem

[James Yates]

Cheers for the help guys. This has been a really perplexing problem. I finally got it to build just before I went home last night. I have tried all the usual according to posts I saw in the list such as disabling 16 bit execution and finally it built.

However, I came into work this morning and thought I would try a build, which failed. I have done a bit of investigation and after listing the differences between my old pc that always works and the new I have, I had a sudden realisation.

My old PC is an Athlon 1.66Ghz. My new PC is a P4 2.8Ghz. I then peformed a little test. I rebooted my PC running Win2k logged onto the domain, waited for all startup scripts to finish then ran outlook. After this I then ran a CYGWIN bash shell and tried a build. I followed this exact same procedure through my testing.

The first time I tried it failed. I repeated the test, rebooting etc as explained. Still failed. I then rebooted and disabled Hyper-Threading in the BIOS, this time the build succeeded. Rebooted again and succeeded. I then turned Hyper-threading back on and the test failed twice consecutively. I have just turned Hyper-Threading off and everything is fine.

I therefore conclude that, certainly for particular environment, turning off Hyper-Threading causes builds in CYGWIN to fail. So if you have a P4 pc, give this a try. I am interested to know if this fixes the same problem on other peoples PC.

	Good luck and thanks for the help.

			James

-----Original Message-----
From: gregory.menke at gsfc.nasa.gov [mailto:gregory.menke at gsfc.nasa.gov]
Sent: 24 March 2004 20:48
To: rtems-users at rtems.com
Subject: Re: Build problem



Cygwin does suffer from handle leaks that persist even after exiting
all Cygwin tasks.  To release them you have to reboot the OS- I get
the same behavior on NT4 and Win2k.  

For me, it shows up when I do a multilib PowerPC toolchain build under
cygwin- about halfway through.  Different versions of cygwin have
different handle leak characteristics, a fairly detailed search shows
this has been more or less of a problem for at least a couple years.
You can watch the handles leak via the Task Manager.

Its not a memory exhaustion problem, but a handle problem- whatever
they are, presumably mutexes/semaphores- whatever, that aren't being
freed properly that Windows allows to leak.

Gregm



Steve Strobel writes:
 > Welcome to the crowd :(  There are several of us on this list that have run into the build_alias problem when compiling RTEMS with Cygwin.  We have found various things to help, but as far as I know, no one has nailed down the exact problem or a way to consistently fix it.  You can check the archive for details, but the following are some of the things that have been mentioned as workarounds:
 > 
 > - Rebooting right before starting a build
 > - Running no unnecessary software during it
 > - Rearranging the order in which the options to "configure" are specified  
 > - Copying bash to sh
 > - Disabling any real-time antivirus checking
 > - Disconnecting from the network
 > 
 > Things that didn't seem to help:
 > - Doubling the amount of memory in the PC (from 256 to 512MB)
 > 
 > Steve
 >