Solaris build error: Bad string

[Michele Denber]

While building qemu2.12.0 on a Sun Oracle Enterprise M3000 SPARC64 VII running Solaris 10U11, opencsw toolchain, gcc 7.3.0, and python 3.3.6 I get:

# gmake
mkdir -p dtc/libfdt
mkdir -p dtc/tests
Bad string
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/dumptrees.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/trees.S
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/testutils.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/value-labels.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/asm_tree_dump.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/truncated_property.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/check_path.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/overlay_bad_fixup.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/overlay.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/subnode_iterate.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/property_iterate.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/integer-expressions.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/utilfdt_test.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/path_offset_aliases.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/add_subnode_with_nops.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/dtbs_equal_unordered.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/dtb_reverse.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/dtbs_equal_ordered.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/extra-terminating-null.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/incbin.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/boot-cpuid.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/phandle_format.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/path-references.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/references.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/string_escapes.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/propname_escapes.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/appendprop2.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/appendprop1.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/del_node.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/del_property.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/setprop.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/set_name.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/rw_tree1.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/open_pack.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/nopulate.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/mangle-layout.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/move_and_save.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/sw_tree1.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/nop_node.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/nop_property.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/setprop_inplace.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/stringlist.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/addr_size_cells.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/notfound.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/sized_cells.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/char_literal.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/get_alias.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/node_offset_by_compatible.c DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/node_check_compatible.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/node_offset_by_phandle.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/node_offset_by_prop_value.c DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/parent_offset.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/supernode_atdepth_offset.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/get_path.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/get_phandle.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/getprop.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/get_name.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/path_offset.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/subnode_offset.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/find_property.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/root_node.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/tests/get_mem_rsv.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt_overlay.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt_addresses.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt_empty_tree.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt_strerror.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt_rw.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt_sw.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt_wip.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt_ro.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/libfdt/fdt.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/util.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/fdtoverlay.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/fdtput.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/fdtget.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/fdtdump.c
         DEP convert-dtsv0-lexer.lex.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/srcpos.c
         DEP dtc-parser.tab.c
         DEP dtc-lexer.lex.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/treesource.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/livetree.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/fstree.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/flattree.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/dtc.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/data.c
         DEP /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/dtc/checks.c
Bad string
         CC libfdt/fdt.o
         CC libfdt/fdt_ro.o
         CC libfdt/fdt_wip.o
         CC libfdt/fdt_sw.o
         CC libfdt/fdt_rw.o
         CC libfdt/fdt_strerror.o
         CC libfdt/fdt_empty_tree.o
         CC libfdt/fdt_addresses.o
         CC libfdt/fdt_overlay.o
         AR libfdt/libfdt.a
a - libfdt/fdt.o
a - libfdt/fdt_ro.o
a - libfdt/fdt_wip.o
a - libfdt/fdt_sw.o
a - libfdt/fdt_rw.o
a - libfdt/fdt_strerror.o
a - libfdt/fdt_empty_tree.o
a - libfdt/fdt_addresses.o
a - libfdt/fdt_overlay.o
ar: creating libfdt/libfdt.a
ar: writing libfdt/libfdt.a
...

gmake then completes, returning just a "#" prompt and no error messages. However, no executable is created. Apparently, "Bad string" is the problem, but it is unclear what that means and where the two instances of it are coming from. A web search for this problem returned nothing.

[Michele Denber (michele31415)]

[Solved]

There's nothing like going public with a problem to find the answer yourself shortly after. In case it helps someone else in the future, it turns out that the Makefile in dtc/ contains the following line:

HOSTOS := $(shell uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | \
   sed -e 's/\(cygwin\|msys\).*/\1/')

Apparently there's something in there that gmake doesn't like which causes it to emit "Bad string" so I just replaced that line with:

HOSTOS=SunOS

(a call to uname -s from the command line returns SunOS) and I'm no longer getting the "Bad string" from gmake. (I'm getting soemthing else now but that's a different matter).

[Michele Denber (michele31415)]

Oh, and how I found this. From http://lists.xymon.com/archive/2012-July/035109.html:

> Sorry to reply to myself. Looks like this line:
>
> uname -s | tr '[/]' '[_]'
>
> ...is not acceptable to /usr/bin/tr on Solaris 10. It worked fine
> on 9. On 10, one receives this error:
>
> # uname -s | tr '[/]' '[_]' Bad string

And indeed I get:

# uname -s | tr '[/]' '[_]'
Bad string
#

So this is a bug in the Makefile, but only for Solaris 10.

[Daniel Berrange (berrange)]

It sounds more like a bug / limited featureset in the Solaris 'tr' binary.

What is your $PATH ? Make sure /usr/xpg4/bin directory appears *before* /usr/bin in $PATH to get a more functional version of 'tr', though I'm not sure if that'll fix it or not.

[Michele Denber (michele31415)]

You are absolutely correct. I found the right problem but the wrong reason. Note that:

# which tr
/usr/bin/tr
# uname -s | tr '[/]' '[_]'
Bad string
# uname -s | /usr/xpg4/bin/tr '[/]' '[_]'
SunOS
#

So it's just another POSIX problem with Solaris, not a bug. Solaris provides all the POSIX stuff, it just doesn't make it the default.