Re: GCC 4.6.0 Released

[Rainer Orth <ro at CeBiTec dot Uni-Bielefeld dot DE>]

Dennis Clarke <dclarke@blastwave.org> writes:

>> The only caveat are strange errors with gmake:
>>
>> make[3]: write error
>>
>> See CR 6938116	GNU make highly unreliable: `write error' message.
>>
>> I've hacked around this by ignoring the error in misc.c (close_stdout) ;-)
>>
>
> It seems odd that gmake would pass every test in its own testsuite and
> then get an odd little message like that. Oh well, if you feel it can be

It only happens once in a while, and primarily for Solaris 11 NFS
servers.  Even more rarely, it occurs on Solaris 11 locally.

> ignored then I'm so very happy to see this.

I think it is harmless enough to be ignored in this particular case, but
this deviation from pre-S11 behaviour is bad.  Suddenly expecting every
single piece of software to handle EINTR all over the place when you
didn't need to before and don't need it on any other platform isn't
exactly a winning proposition to me ;-(  I'll try to pursue this with
Solaris engineering.

> By the way, I just want to say thank you for posting results on Solaris
> because I review them and use them for comparison all the time. I am still
> fascinated that GCC can post different results on two servers running the
> same OS and probably with the same revs of tools avail.
>
> Consider this on Sol 8 i386 :
>
>                 === gcc Summary ===
>
> # of expected passes            72652
> # of unexpected failures        18
> # of expected failures          212
> # of unresolved testcases       1
> # of unsupported tests          1874
> /opt/bw/src/GCC/gcc-4.6.0_SunOS5.8_i386.001/gcc/xgcc  version 4.6.0
> (Blastwave.org Inc. Mon Mar 28 13:18:17 GMT 2011)
>
> This : http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresults/2011-03/msg02832.html
>
> 		=== gcc Summary ===
>
> # of expected passes		74529
> # of unexpected failures	1
> # of expected failures		212
> # of unresolved testcases	1
> # of unsupported tests		1031
> /var/gcc/gcc-4.6.0/8-gcc-gas/gcc/xgcc  version 4.6.0 (GCC)

One would have to compare gcc.sum in detail to know what's going on.

> I decided to toss caution to the wind and run my build with as and ld in
> /usr/ccs/bin and I was happy to see a decent result set. I often wonder if
> we *need* GNU as or just *want* GNU as in an older Solaris release like 8.

IMO you want gas on Solaris/x86 before 10 because as lacks several
features there (like visibility support).  On Solaris 10/x86 and up, as
is mostly fine (primarily COMDAT group support is missing, but I'm
working on that with the assembler and linker engineers as we speak).
Unfortunately, a recent as patch broke several -gstabs tests, but this
is expected to be fixed soon.

On Solaris/SPARC I usually do the production builds with as; there seems
little reason to go for gas instead.

Hope this helps.

	Rainer

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Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University