testsuite "spawn failed"

[Ritzert at t-online dot de (Michael Ritzert)]

Hi all,

I get catastrophic results on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (SuSE 9.0)
because of this:

Executing on host: /home/ritzert/NO_BACKUP/compile/gcc/HEAD/gcc/testsuite/../g++ -B/home/ritzert/NO_BACKUP/compile/gcc/HEAD/gcc/testsuite/../ /home/ritzert/gcc/HEAD/gcc/gcc/testsuite/g++.dg/bprob/g++-bprob-1.C  -nostdinc++ -I/home/ritzert/NO_BACKUP/compile/gcc/HEAD/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/libstdc++-v3/include/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu -I/home/ritzert/NO_BACKUP/compile/gcc/HEAD/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/libstdc++-v3/include -I/home/ritzert/gcc/HEAD/gcc/libstdc++-v3/libsupc++ -I/home/ritzert/gcc/HEAD/gcc/libstdc++-v3/libsupc++ -I/home/ritzert/gcc/HEAD/gcc/libstdc++-v3/include/backward -I/home/ritzert/gcc/HEAD/gcc/libstdc++-v3/testsuite -fmessage-length=0  -O1  -fprofile-arcs    -L/home/ritzert/NO_BACKUP/compile/gcc/HEAD/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/./libstdc++-v3/src/.libs -L/home/ritzert/NO_BACKUP/compile/gcc/HEAD/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/./libiberty  -lm   -o /home/ritzert/NO_BACKUP/compile/gcc/HEAD/gcc/testsuite/g++-bprob-1.x21    (timeout = 300)
compiler exited with status -1
output is:
spawn failed

This happens 10631 times just for the g++ testsuite.
The overall results are

      === acats Summary ===
# of expected passes    2318
# of unexpected failures   4

      === g++ Summary ===

# of expected passes    231
# of unexpected failures   8581
# of unexpected successes  38
# of expected failures     37
# of unresolved testcases  114
# of untested testcases    36
# of unsupported tests     89

      === g77 Summary ===

# of unexpected failures   1098
# of unresolved testcases  33
# of untested testcases    456
# of unsupported tests     6

      === gcc Summary ===

# of expected passes    747
# of unexpected failures   18503
# of unexpected successes  34
# of expected failures     14
# of unresolved testcases  5415
# of untested testcases    448
# of unsupported tests     32

      === objc Summary ===

# of expected passes    9
# of unexpected failures   794
# of unresolved testcases  511
# of unsupported tests     8

      === libffi Summary ===

# of unexpected failures   77
# of unsupported tests     2

      === libjava Summary ===

# of expected passes    563
# of unexpected failures   1208
# of expected failures     9
# of untested testcases    1510

      === libstdc++ Summary ===

# of unexpected failures   1377
# of expected failures     3
# of unsupported tests     9

So Ada seems mostly uneffected while all other components look really
bad.
I haven't seen this problem on March 22nd. Since then I only applied the
SuSE security updates where nothing looks suspicious (no new expect,
dejagnu, ...).

The command doesn't fail when I run it from the command line and so far
I haven't been able to find where the "spawn failed" comes from.

I found a description of the same error in the archives:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/1999-03n/msg01010.html
but the thread ends without a solution.

Does anybody know what is causing this?

Michael

PS: runtest --version:
Expect version is       5.38.0
Tcl version is          8.4
Framework version is    1.4.3