5.3 STABLE kernel compilation oddity

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Martin Nilsson wrote:

> I've seen something similar to this on 5.3 and 5.3-STABLE buildworld it
> happens on fast machines (both SMP & UP) when running 'make -j n
> buildworld' with n larger than about 8. It does not happen everytime,
> just often enough to make you wonder if the hardware is flaky or not. 
> 
> I have seen this on P4E (Prescott), Xeon (533FSB & 800FSB) as well as
> SMP Opterons. I can't remember getting it on the Celerons. If anybody
> wants patches that fixes this tested, I'd be happy to help. It is very
> annoying when using buildworld to see if a newly built machine is
> working OK. 

What specific failure mode are you seeing?  Typically, hardware problems
cause compiler segfaults, data corruption, etc, which tend to manifest
fairly differently from dependency problems, where the failure mode is
almost always an error about a missing library, include file, or the like.

Robert N M Watson