Re: Arm v7 RPi2 -current unresponsive to debugger escape during buildworld

From: Paul Mather <paul_at_gromit.dlib.vt.edu>
Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:42:24 UTC 
On Nov 6, 2025, at 9:22 pm, bob prohaska <fbsd@www.zefox.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 06, 2025 at 10:00:19AM -0800, Mark Millard wrote:
>> On Nov 6, 2025, at 08:38, bob prohaska <fbsd@www.zefox.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Nov 06, 2025 at 03:45:01PM +0100, Ronald Klop wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> To me it sounds like your machine is overwhelmed by swapping.
>>>> 
>>>> Try -j1 buildworld.
> Maybe a -j1 buildworld could be at least somewhat informative.
> Lately none of my Pi2's has made it through buildworld 
> without hanging silently. If -j1 buildworld completes,
> that would be a significant change. The test will take a
> week, but the problem has been going on for a year.


This isn't related directly to building on the RPi2, but just a general comment that on a system with 1 GB RAM like the RPi2, building with -j3 (or anything more than -j1) is probably wishful thinking at this point given it seems the RAM requirements of LLVM right now seem to be creeping ever upwards.

LLVM 19.1.7 seems slower and more memory-hungry than ever before.  Maybe it's LTO?  I don't know.  My current bugbear is the databases/mongodb70 port which will no longer build for me on the 16 GB RAM FreeBSD/amd64 14-STABLE system I use to build ports locally via Poudriere.  It will grind away for hours and ultimately fail due to the compiler being out of memory at some point.  I found a Bugzilla report by someone who attested it required 24 GB RAM to build, and it will only successfully build now for me if I add an extra 30 GB swap or so on that build system.  Even then, it takes an age to build: the last successful one being 12:39:27 (and that potentially benefitting from prior ccache builds).  That mongodb70 port takes about an order of magnitude longer to build than an entire buildword/buildkernel on the same system.

I guess building software yourself just takes more RAM these days, and recognise that the RPi2 does not have much RAM in the grand scheme of things by today's standards.  I hope a "-j1" build works for you.

Cheers,

Paul.