Re: Preliminary MIPS N32 port now available

[Mark H Weaver]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Nikita,
>
> Nikita Karetnikov <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I tried to build ‘hello’ twice, and the following error occurred each
>> time:
>>
>> stripping binaries in
>> "/nix/store/hl8khv4qip9nwbm1qm93irbz9has4wrd-gcc-cross-boot0-4.7.3/bin"
>> with "strip" and flags ("--strip-debug")
>> phase `strip' succeeded after 17 seconds
>> error (ignored): aborting transaction: cannot rollback - no transaction is 
>> active
>> guix package: error: build failed: committing transaction: disk I/O error
>>
>> I guess something is wrong with my system, what should I check?
>
> I looked into this, and the problem is an incompatibility between SQLite
> and JFS.  When SQLite commits a transaction, it uses 'fsync' on a
> directory, which is apparently not supported by JFS.  This problem was
> noticed by an AIX user back in 2008.  It looks like they worked around
> the problem by changing SQLite's behavior on AIX systems, but that
> obviously doesn't help you.
>
>   http://news.gmane.org/group/gmane.comp.db.sqlite.general/thread=39682
>
> I think your best option is to switch back to ext3 or ext4.

I looked further into this, and it seems that newer versions of SQLite
handle this more gracefully.  In the version I have on my home-grown
system (sqlite-autoconf-3070603), it appears that they ignore this
error.  There's also a preprocessor define you can set called
SQLITE_DISABLE_DIRSYNC.

I still think it's probably a good idea to switch away from JFS, since
you're likely to run into other problems like this, but if you really
want to stick with JFS, compiling a newer version of SQLite and then
reconfiguring and rebuilding Guix might get you past this immediate
problem.

     Mark