Some Recipes Randomly Fail

[Wilfred Smith]

Perhaps it’s something that I’m doing wrong…

My CentOS 7 build VM has 14GB RAM with 2 GB allocated for swap. Although I never pass 12GB RAM or 520 MB of swap, a “Bitbake obmc-phosphor-image” will often fail a recipe with compilation errors that go away if I rebuild that particular recipe. Normally, the failing recipe is something like entity-manager, dbus-sensors or bmcweb, all three of which are larger applications. If I specifically Bitbake the failing applications, then go back and build the image recipe, I will typically get closer to a completely successful build. Sometimes it takes multiple repetitions, but it always converges to a successful build.

It concerns me that these are random compilation errors in code that, presumably, works fine for most everyone, and that the errors are transient.

FWIW, I’m allocating all 8 threads (4 cores) of my MacBook Pro when building. This issue occurs with both Parallels, VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion, but the final build image always seems to function reasonably well. I have not seen an issue with any of the smaller recipes.

Thoughts appreciated. Also, please say something if you know the root cause or have seen the same issue. 

Wilfred