Re: BUG #15525: Build failures when compiling Postgres with Make parallelization

Hi Tom & List,

OP reported the bug I encountered on my behalf, which is reported to
nixpkgs at
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/51093#issuecomment-442301157
. I'm not a subscriber to this list and have constructed the threading
headers manually (I hope this works). Please CC me in replies where
relevant.

Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> This isn't too helpful if you don't mention which macOS version nor what
> sort of hardware exactly. Most PG developers use parallel builds
> routinely, so we know that it's not broken in general.

To complicate matters further, I'm reporting the nixpkgs bug on behalf
of my mac-using colleague. His machine overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro14,3
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.9 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 16 GB
Boot ROM Version: 185.0.0.0.0
SMC Version (system): 2.45f0

The build is happening on an APFS file system, I believe.

> - snip discussion of process-spawn failures at high -j numbers -

> Having said that, we did do a round of patches in the v11 development
> cycle that addressed some parallel-make hazards. A lot of said hazards
> were new in v11 :-(, but I think that some of them were pre-existing
> problems. So you might find that PG 11 is more resistant to whatever
> is going on here.

A failing build log is attached to the nixpkgs GH issue at
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/files/2617687/build.log I note that it
calls `ar rcs libpgtypes.a ...` multiple times during the build, and I
speculate that these `ar` invocations start racing each other.

@delroth on GH notes:

@delroth> Starting in 9.1.0 (postgres/postgres(at)19e231b) this is in the postgres codebase:
@delroth>
@delroth> ./src/interfaces/ecpg/compatlib/Makefile: $(MAKE) -C $(top_builddir)/src/interfaces/ecpg/pgtypeslib all
@delroth> ./src/interfaces/ecpg/ecpglib/Makefile: $(MAKE) -C $(top_builddir)/src/interfaces/ecpg/pgtypeslib all

> BTW, are you using the Apple-supplied make, or some other version?
> In the past we've had to fight with parallelism bugs in old gmake
> versions ...

Whatever nixpkgs asks for, which is probably gnumake, and it looks like
nixpkgs has gnumake 4.2.1.

HTH,

-- Jack