FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE source update fails during compilation

[Clayton Milos]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Josh Paetzel" <josh at tcbug.org>
To: "Jason Vance" <jason at theyhost.com>
Cc: <freebsd-stable at freebsd.org>
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 12:22 AM
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE source update fails during compilation


> Jason Vance wrote:
>> I'm unable to buildworld on a brand new installation of freebsd 6.1. 
>> Almost
>> everytime my build fails on the genattrtab.c section of cc_tools.  I've 
>> tried
>> multiple harddrives, and downloaded the source code many times.  A couple 
>> of
>> times the system has rebooted itself, once during cvsup of the source 
>> code, and
>> again during a build.
>>
>> What else should I be looking for to diagnose this problem?
>>
>> My System:
>>
>> FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE
>> 733MHZ Intel P3
>> Asus pv3-4x latest bios 1006.004
>> Sound Blaster Live
>> Voodoo 3 16mb GFX Card
>> HDDs:  I've tried 3 different drives, the first few tries were with 2 
>> drives
>> gmirror'd and then without the gmirror ( RAID 1 )
>>
>> Memtest checks out ok ( Ran 5 hours 150 loops )
>>
>> Here is the last few lines of everytime I've tried to compile the source.
>>
>
> Failures likes these are almost always hardware related.  If it was a
> software problem it would die at the same place every time.  You
> could be suffering from overheating, bad ram (regardless of what
> memtest tells you) power fluctuations due to a faulty PSU, or any
> other number of esoteric problems.  FreeBSD has this knack of not
> playing nicely with partially broken hardware. :)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Josh Paetzel
>

The first thing I would blame would be the memory. Memtest running OK seems 
to write that off but it could still be that or likely somehting else that 
is hardware related.

Every time there's been a software fault in FreeBSD it happens in the same 
place which is expected. As Josh says I've had the experience with FreeBSD 
working partially with broken hardware and then falling apart under load. 
Heat is a really random error that is often a problem. Is your heatsink 
coping well? Are you using Maxtor drives ? I've said this before and forgive 
me for my slamming of Maxtor hard drives but they get their lovely speed 
from not ECC checking the PATA bus which is awesme for corrupting data and 
giving you erratic errors.

Perhaps the motherboard is even faulty. Give all your RAM and peripheral 
cards a wiggle to make sure they have a good connection. I only use ECC RAM 
because non-ECC RAM has given friends of mine some really random 
unreplicable errors that confused them for a while.

Why are you upgrading to 6.1 and not 6.2? Is there a specific reason? I'd 
really advise using 6.2 because there were some issues with 6.1 even if it 
wasn't with your specific hardware.

-Clay