bug#40522: ‘guile3.0-guix’ sometimes fails to build on i686 (“Too many heap sections”)

bug#40522: ‘guile3.0-guix’ sometimes fails to build on i686 (“Too many heap sections”)

[Ludovic Courtès]

‘guile3.0-guix’ occasionally fails to build on i686-linux:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
[ 94%] GUILEC   gnu/services/cuirass.go
[ 94%] GUILEC   gnu/services/cups.go
GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes
GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes

[...]

GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes
GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes
Too many heap sections: Increase MAXHINCR or MAX_HEAP_SECTS
/gnu/store/7ffcr3knh5jrj3lig4qf4fv0iws51l14-bash-minimal-5.0.7/bin/bash: line 7: 28331 Aborted                 XDG_CACHE_HOME=/nowhere host=i686-unknown-linux-gnu srcdir="." ./pre-inst-env /gnu/store/znlp9v4z0pda450bbsfqzppqj2m61sz9-guile-next-3.0.2/bin/guile -L "." -L "." --no-auto-compile -s "."/build-aux/compile-all.scm […]
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

(From
<https://berlin.guixsd.org/log/czsdfjykhlc4ngjdva17i4rglpnh86fl-guile3.0-guix-1.0.1-15.0984481>.)

<https://berlin.guixsd.org/search?query=guile3.0-guix+system%3Ai686-linux>
suggests it happens only occasionally.  I suspect it’s more likely when
doing ‘-j 96’ than when doing ‘-j 4’ because the former requires more
memory.

Ludo’.

bug#40522: ‘guile3.0-guix’ sometimes fails to build on i686 (“Too many heap sections”)

[Danny Milosavljevic]

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https://github.com/Macaulay2/M2/issues/500 says there it's the Boehm GC being
configured for small memory by default.

They say setting the environment variable GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE (to
like "50G") helps.  Not sure why.

Also, there's an environment variable GC_MAXIMUM_HEAP_SIZE.

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bug#40522: ‘guile3.0-guix’ sometimes fails to build on i686 (“Too many heap sections”)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org> skribis:

> https://github.com/Macaulay2/M2/issues/500 says there it's the Boehm GC being
> configured for small memory by default.

Hmm, weird.  ‘core-updates’ is on libgc 8.x (instead of 7.x), so we’ll
have to check if the same happens.

> They say setting the environment variable GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE (to
> like "50G") helps.  Not sure why.
>
> Also, there's an environment variable GC_MAXIMUM_HEAP_SIZE.

Looks like an ugly workaround, at best.  :-)

Thanks for checking!

Ludo’.

bug#40522: ‘guile3.0-guix’ sometimes fails to build on i686 (“Too many heap sections”)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> skribis:

> ‘guile3.0-guix’ occasionally fails to build on i686-linux:
>
> [ 94%] GUILEC   gnu/services/cuirass.go
> [ 94%] GUILEC   gnu/services/cups.go
> GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes
> GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes
>
> [...]
>
> GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes
> GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes
> Too many heap sections: Increase MAXHINCR or MAX_HEAP_SECTS
> /gnu/store/7ffcr3knh5jrj3lig4qf4fv0iws51l14-bash-minimal-5.0.7/bin/bash: line 7: 28331 Aborted                 XDG_CACHE_HOME=/nowhere host=i686-unknown-linux-gnu srcdir="." ./pre-inst-env /gnu/store/znlp9v4z0pda450bbsfqzppqj2m61sz9-guile-next-3.0.2/bin/guile -L "." -L "." --no-auto-compile -s "."/build-aux/compile-all.scm […]
>
> (From
> <https://berlin.guixsd.org/log/czsdfjykhlc4ngjdva17i4rglpnh86fl-guile3.0-guix-1.0.1-15.0984481>.)

I believe this is fixed by the switch to Guile 3.0.4 in commit
a2991de0f44a5f4db71ddad67e914fe3344a4505 (June 2020), where ‘-O1’ uses
the new “baseline compiler”, which is much less memory-hungry.

Ludo’.