2.4.19-xfs eating filehandles when compiled with gcc 3.2

Hi,

I know you might be very busy with the 2.5 -> 2.6 transition, but this is the only list I could imagine that has the answer to my problem.

I have a Gentoo Linux 1.4 RC1 system, that ships with a GCC 3.2 compiler and 2.4.19 with the XFS patches (and IMON btw).

I have just bootstrapped my system and everything went fine until I first started (tried to) Gnome. It just freezes for a while and after that it breaks and jumps back to the console.

Nothing in syslog, nothing anywhere.

A little bit later (I think after a kernel recompile) I discovered a message like "too many open files" and catted /proc/sys/fs/file-nr which gives this output:

8196 8006 8196

I rebooted and started this script on VC/2:

# while true; do sleep 3; cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr; done

I then did some testing on the other console, just ran some commands while watching the output of my script :)

First I ran a find / -name \*, which brought the second file-nr value to
6. There was some jumping between 4-6 for a while but it kept at six after that.

Then I did recompile the kernel, the value went to 175. Then I recompiled glibc which made it jump to 400 something. Funnily enough a find / -name \* lowered the value by certain amount again. (But it kept increasing after a while).

I have bootstrapped my whole system once with CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -mpipe" and CXXFLAGS=$CFLAGS.

And once with "-march=athlon-xp -mcpu=athlon-xp ..." don't ask me why, I don't know so much about these two flags, the seconds approach did at least remove some warnings.

My first thought was that gcc 3.2 has some compatibility issues with the kernel and glibc. Of course it could be gnome, too.

Perhaps anybody knows of any issues with gcc 3.2??

Regards,
mikael

Does it happen when you use gcc-2.95.4+ ?

--cw

When using Gentoo 1.3 (which uses gcc-2.95.4+) I did not experience these problems even if the packages where almost the same versions (some packages changed while I was doing the transition).

I'm using the gentoo kernel 2.4.19 with xfs patches, gentoo has included some other patches too, don't have the list at hand but I can come back to that later.

I imagine getting some fuzzy warning messages when compiling the kernel, in the XFS subtree, I can post these if you're interested.

I'll try the newest 2.5.x kernel as soon as the machine finished bootstrapping again (just reinstalling the system with CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CXXFLAGS=$CFLAGS).

I really don't want to give up a GCC 3.2 built system with -march=athlon-xp since the build time for a kernel decreased by almost 90 seconds after a bootstrap. I.e. a system compiled with gcc3.2 compiled a kernel at 5 minutes and a gcc2.95.4+ system compiled the same kernel with the same .config in 6:27 minutes.

Regards,
Mikael

-----Original Message-----

You have a solution then: don't use gcc 3.2 for the kernel.

Use 2.95.4+ for the kernel and gcc 3.2+ for user-land then.

--cw