I've added this useful response to the GHC Building FAQ, here http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/FAQ Please continue to add material to this page. Simon | -----Original Message----- | From: haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Duncan | Coutts | Sent: 07 January 2007 13:38 | To: tphyahoo | Cc: haskell-cafe@haskell.org | Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] trouble installing ghc 6.6: xargs: /usr/bin/ar: terminated by signal 11 | | On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 15:30 -0800, tphyahoo wrote: | > I'm having trouble installing ghc 6.6. On ubuntu, virtual server (user mode | > linux). | > | > Something seems to be killing the process, no idea why. | > | > Anyone seen this? | | Yes. | | > /usr/bin/ar: creating libHSbase.a | > xargs: /usr/bin/ar: terminated by signal 11 | | | What is happening is that the ghc build system is linking thousands and | thousands of tiny .o files into libHSbase.a. GNU ar isn't optimised for | this use-case and it takes far more memory than it really needs to. So | what happens is that ar takes >500Mb of memory and your virtual | machine / virtual server probably isn't configured with that much memory | and so the linux kernel OOM killer terminates the ar process. | | To make this worse, since there are so many .o files, it takes several | invocations of ar to link them all. On each invocation ar is building | the symbol index (-q is ignored) and this is what takes the most time | and memory. It's a good deal quicker to use a custom program (100 lines | of Haskell) to build libHSbase.a and then use ranlib just once to build | the symbol index. | | I submitted a patch to gnu binutils to make ar take less memory when | linking 1000's of files so it now only takes around 100Mb rather than | 500Mb when linking libHSbase.a. That patch is included in version 2.17 I | think (in other words most systems don't have it yet). | | What you can do in the mean time is either configure your virtual | machine with more memory or turn off the split-objs feature when you | configure ghc. Just add SplitObjs=NO" to your mk/build.mk file (which | may not exist to start with). (The Gentoo ebuild does this | automatically) | | Duncan | | _______________________________________________ | Haskell-Cafe mailing list | Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org | http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe