Guix fails to build libreoffice

Hi everyone!

I've recently tried to reconfigure my system, but after about 3 hours

of building libreoffice, the system froze for 2 hours and then guix

threw:

- 'build' phasebuilder for

`/gnu/store/ndibmh084iqmhv1ldv3fr3380mfk6qzg-libreoffice-6.1.5.2.drv'

failed with exit code 1 build

of /gnu/store/ndibmh084iqmhv1ldv3fr3380mfk6qzg-libreoffice-6.1.5.2.drv

failed View build log at

'/var/log/guix/drvs/nd/ibmh084iqmhv1ldv3fr3380mfk6qzg-libreoffice-6.1.5.2.drv.bz2'.

guix system: error: build of

`/gnu/store/ndibmh084iqmhv1ldv3fr3380mfk6qzg-libreoffice-6.1.5.2.drv'

failed

My system is an old ThinkPad with 2GB of RAM and Intel Centrino Duo

processor, but I'm unsure if this was the cause of the build failing.

I saw some other packages have similar problems like, if my memory is

correct, the support for ARM have been removed from webkit-qt.

I'm not sure if removing support for an achitecture is the right

solution here - wouldn't it be better if Guix checked if the system is

powerful enough to handle building certain packages?

Here's the part of the log where it fails:

[build CXX] sc/source/core/data/colcontainer.cxx

[build CXX] sc/source/core/data/column.cxx

[build CXX] sc/source/core/data/column2.cxx

[build CXX] sc/source/core/data/column3.cxx

g++: internal compiler error: Killed (program cc1plus)

Please submit a full bug report,

with preprocessed source if appropriate.

See http://gcc.gnu.org/bugs.html for instructions.

make[1]: ***

[/tmp/guix-build-libreoffice-6.1.5.2.drv-0/libreoffice-6.1.5.2/solenv/gbuild/LinkTarget.mk:293: /tmp/guix-build-libreoffice-6.1.5.2.drv-0/libreoffice-6.1.5.2/workdir/CxxObject/sc/source/core/data/column2.o] Error 4

make[1]: *** Deleting file

'/tmp/guix-build-libreoffice-6.1.5.2.drv-0/libreoffice-6.1.5.2/workdir/CxxObject/sc/source/core/data/column2.o'

make[1]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....

make: *** [Makefile:286: build] Error 2

Backtrace:

4 (primitive-load "/gnu/store/8d49s04zpk9frpz9isawr8k4fma…")

In ice-9/eval.scm:

191:35 3 (_ _)

In srfi/srfi-1.scm:

863:16 2 (every1 #<procedure 5073a0 at /gnu/store/0npakqh7q9kfi…> …)

In /gnu/store/0npakqh7q9kfik8y0cc0vjqqpvnyv2h1-module-import/guix/build/gnu-build-system.scm:

799:28 1 (_ _)

In /gnu/store/0npakqh7q9kfik8y0cc0vjqqpvnyv2h1-module-import/guix/build/utils.scm:

616:6 0 (invoke _ . _)

/gnu/store/0npakqh7q9kfik8y0cc0vjqqpvnyv2h1-module-import/guix/build/utils.scm:616:6:

In procedure invoke:

Throw to key `srfi-34' with args `(#<condition &invoke-error [program:

"make" arguments: ("-j" "2" "build-nocheck") exit-status: 2

term-signal: #f stop-signal: #f] 491200>)'.

---

Jan Wielkiewicz

Jan,

Thanks for the report, and sorry you had to learn this the hard

way.

Jan Wielkiewicz ???

[…]

This message and the freezing above is a tell-tale sign of OOM

(out-of-memory). If you check your dmesg or /var/log/messages at

that time, I'm almost certain you'll see the OOM killer plot its

dastardly deeds.

You may be sure.

2 GiB of RAM is simply not enough to build many packages these

days. That's the world we live in. There's nothing Guix can do

to change that.

You can restrict the number of parallel builds and jobs by

respectively passing --max-jobs=1 and --cores=1 to the daemon.

You can make this permanent by setting (extra-options …) in your

system configuration.

Even then, some complex executables will simply fail to link with

so little RAM.

I don't see how this is related to running out of RAM. If

webkit-qt is broken on ARM that's unfortunate, but it's better to

mark it as such than failing to build it on 100% of ARM systems.

Your issue is different: the exact same libreoffice might have

built fine if you had 4 GiB of RAM, or 3, or 5, or 2 with swap,

but only if your weren't also running any (Guix or other) builds

at the time, or watching a movie, or had the room thermostat

turned up, or use Gnome 3, all beneath a gibbous moon. All these

things, and many more, will cause builds to fail or succeed

‘randomly’.

The only way to know is to try.

I personally think the annoyances of ‘helpful’ warnings

(=extremely inaccurate guesses) would far outweigh any purported

benefit.

Kind regards,

T G-R

On Sun, 2019-09-22 at 19:45 +0200, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice via Bug reports for

GNU Guix wrote:

You can get around too little RAM by using swap, correct? Partition ~8GB as

swap and add (swap-devices) in the configuration.

Jesse Gibbons ???

Sure, I think I suggested that (I was serious about Gnome, too!).

People tend to underestimate just how slow swap is by several

orders of magnitude, though.

Not sure about LibreOffice, but I doubt you'll have much luck

building, say, Chromium with 2 GiB of physical RAM, with or

without swap — but I admit I haven't been crazy enough to try :-)

Another hack you can try is enabling 50% zstd zswap, but with 2

GiB of RAM and such an old CPU that too is far out in diminishing

returns territory. It could just crash your kernel.

Kind regards,

T G-R

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice ???

Or just how quickly it can destroy an SSD.

Kind regards,

T G-R

On Sun, 22 Sep 2019 19:45:52 +0200

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> wrote:

Sad, guess I have to buy more RAM.

Cool, didn't know about this option.

I actually have a 10GB sized swap file created on an SSD and

defined in the config.scm, but it didn't help. I'm also using Mate, but

I can try without any DE. The only two things running in the background

were Mate, mate terminal, Guix and %desktop-services.

Is there a way to skip building libreoffice, if the substitute isn't

available?

Even more fun... Waiting for a powerful libre computer from from the

ground, because running on old ThinkPads forever isn't the right

solution.

Thanks for explanations and help,

Jan Wielkiewicz

Hello,

Jan <tona_kosmicznego_smiecia@interia.pl> skribis:

There’s no way to skip it. However, there are a couple of tricks:

• The ‘--dry-run’ option always shows what would be built or

downloaded, so you can run, say, ‘guix upgrade --dry-run’ and see if

libreoffice is among the things that would be built.

• You can do ‘guix package -u . --do-not-upgrade=libreoffice’ to

upgrade everything but packages whose name contains “libreoffice”.

HTH!

Ludo’.

tags 37482 notabug

close 37482

quit

On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 22:04:50 +0200

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

What about adding an option to only download substitutes for older

devices? I saw someone talking about such feature on the mailing list,

don't know where exactly though.

Will use these options next time, thanks for the info.

Jan Wielkiewicz

Hello,

Jan <tona_kosmicznego_smiecia@interia.pl> skribis:

That’s not possible in the general case. Also, it would be problematic

security-wise because you could easily find yourself installing older

versions with known vulnerabilities.

Thanks,

Ludo’.