Subject: bug#21720: Building gcc fails at target s-attrtab

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2015 22:05:07 +0100

Aljosha Papsch <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On 21.10.2015 18:38, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

[...]

>> How much memory does this machine have?
> It got 4GB of RAM but none of swap. dmesg really shows something,
> please see attachment. I'll try hooking up some swap and see how it
> goes.
>
> I'm curious: How did you compile gcc in the past, where resources were
> even more scarce? Did you always have a good load of swap for it to
> succeed? I remember the rule "swap is 2 times ram", though in recent
> years some are convinced that it worn off given the ever bigger RAM.

I regularly build it on my laptop, which has 8G of RAM and little swap.
The build machines behind hydra.gnu.org all have more than 4G of RAM, I
think.

> [ 2779.152334] genattrtab invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x280da, order=0, oom_score_adj=0

Indeed, ‘genattrtab’ is a program in GCC used when building it.  It’s a
problem that it needs so much memory.  I would suggest reporting it if
nobody did that already.

Thanks,
Ludo’.