webkit build fails on binutils limitation

[Sebastien Bacher]

Seems like the amd64 build for webkit on quantal hits http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14302 ... can we get the fix backported?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

The upstream bug refers to a 32-bit-only issue: on amd64, size_t (et al.) are 64-bit, so have no 4GB limit. So the upstream patch should have no effect at all on amd64.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

does the build succeed with binutils 2.22?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

No, it's still an issue on current quantal
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/114802531/buildlog_ubuntu-quantal-amd64.webkit_1.9.91-0ubuntu1~build1_FAILEDTOBUILD.txt.gz

with
"Get:26 http://ftpmaster.internal/ubuntu/ quantal/main binutils amd64 2.22.90.20120816-2ubuntu1 [2384 kB]"

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

- asking again, does this build with 2.22?
- where can the webkit version 1.9.91 be found?

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

trying to reproduce this ...

make[1]: execvp: /bin/bash: Argument list too long
make[1]: *** [libWebCore.la] Error 127
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/packages/tmp/webkit-1.9.91/build-2.0'
make: *** [build-stamp] Error 2

honestly, this webkit build sucks :-/

and it should support DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=<n>

[Iain Lane (laney)]

I backported this patch

  http://code.metager.de/source/xref/WebKit/Tools/gtk/patches/make-3.82-arg-list-length.patch

to a local build of make-dfsg (to get past the error you got), and tried to build webkit from

  https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/+archive/ppa/+packages

but it fails with

  ar: .libs/libWebCore.a: File truncated
  make[1]: *** [libWebCore.la] Error 1
  make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ubuntu/webkit-1.9.91/build-2.0'

  ubuntu@server-16875:~/webkit-1.9.91$ apt-cache policy binutils
  binutils:
    Installed: 2.22.90.20120919-0ubuntu1
    Candidate: 2.22.90.20120919-0ubuntu1
    Version table:
   *** 2.22.90.20120919-0ubuntu1 0
          500 http://nova.clouds.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal/main amd64 Packages
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Iain Lane (laney)]

If you filter out -g from CFLAGS, the .a isn't too large and webkit builds successfully. I'm not sure this is a viable solution for the archive though. I suppose splitting libWebCore up into multiple smaller libraries would solve both problems, but that would require diving into webkit's build system...

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

might be worth building with -gstabs instead of -g to avoid building without -g at all.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

is the make patch included in upstream make (trunk)?

[Iain Lane (laney)]

I'm trying a -gstabs build right now. Just checked, the patch isn't in trunk sadly. I'm not aware if anyone has proposed it.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

checked that the binutils in the ubuntu-toolchain-r PPA doesn't show this ar issue.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

seen with a webkit-1.91 build on x86_64-linux-gnu, works with 2.22 from the release branch, fails with the 2.23 branch and trunk.

ar: .libs/libWebCore.a: File truncated
make[1]: *** [libWebCore.la] Error 1

to reproduce with the tarball from
http://people.debian.org/~doko/tmp/build.tar.xz

mkdir -p .libs
rm -f .libs/libWebCore.a
sh ar.sh

[Alan Modra (amodra-gmail)]

You're running into archive.c:2661
   /* Catch an attempt to grow an archive past its 4Gb limit. */
   if (archive_member_file_ptr != (file_ptr) offset)
     {
       bfd_set_error (bfd_error_file_truncated);
       return FALSE;
     }
   if (!bfd_write_bigendian_4byte_int (arch, offset))
     return FALSE;

Previous versions of binutils created invalid armaps. We can't do much about this problem without changing archive format for x86_64. I suppose that is a possibility.

If you just want an archive for packaging purposes as distinct from using the archive as a linker input, then you can work around this problem by disabling the armap with ar's S option.

I'm closing this bug report as invalid since the archive format simply doesn't support such large archives. Please take any discussion (patches!) regarding changing archive format to the binutils list.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

according to upstream, >4G archives suiteable for the linker are not supported (and were not before, but accepted).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.