[U-Boot] Fwd: Parallel build is broken

[Trent Piepho]

On Wed, 2018-09-05 at 06:57 -0500, Adam Ford wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 3:46 AM Alex Kiernan <alex.kiernan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 3:54 PM Andy Shevchenko
> > <andy.shevchenko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 5:50 PM Andy Shevchenko
> > > <andy.shevchenko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 5:00 PM Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > On Tue, Sep 04, 2018 at 03:42:05PM +0300, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> > > > > > From: Andy Shevchenko <andy.shevchenko at gmail.com>
> > > > > > Date: Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 3:40 PM
> > > > > > Subject: Parallel build is broken
> > > > > > To: Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com>
> > > > > > Cc: Bin Meng <bmeng.cn at gmail.com>, Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > U-Boot can't be build with make -j16.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Second pass passes fine.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Didn't investigate myself and probably will not have time (near to
> > > > > > vacation time for me).
> > > > > > So, please, fix it before release.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > sh: echo: I/O error
> > > > > > make[1]: *** [scripts/Makefile.build:278: common/malloc_simple.o] Error 1
> 
> I am no expert, but I/O error to me indicates a hardware problem on
> the build machine and not necessarily a software issue.

I doubt that is the issue.  While EIO can be returned in response to a
hardware failure, it would be very random and most likely affect
something - the linker, a compiler - that process a lot of files or
data, not an echo command.


> > I've seen this problem - building inside a VMware VM. I've always
> > found that logging out and back in appears to fix it, so possibly
> > something related to the session... I've similarly failed to figure
> > out what the problem is as it comes and goes.

This is likely on track to the real problem.  What happened is
something echo did returned EIO as an errno.  That failing syscall was
probably a write(3), since echo doesn't do a whole lot else!  And why
can write(3) return EIO, besides a hardware error?

       EIO    The process is a member of  a  background  process  group
              attempting  to  write to its controlling terminal, TOSTOP
              is set, the calling thread is not blocking  SIGTTOU,  the
              process is not ignoring SIGTTOU, and the process group of
              the process is orphaned. This error may also be  returned
              under implementation-defined conditions.

I think there's a $(shell echo something &) or something like that
somewhere.