akcl --- warning on sun

[harmon@xn.ll.mit.edu]

	Bill,

>If you do not do this you can expect failure at RANDOM times during
>the bootstrapping of the compiler.  For example lisp might fail while
>trying to compile cmpnew/cmpvar.lsp with a random lisp error.  Yet if
>you type make in the cmpnew directory again, it may well complete ok.
>For example I compiled cmpnew/cmplam.lsp 100 times, restarting the
>interpreted lisp (built during the first make pass of akcl),
>identically each time.  It failed 5 times out of 100.  During the
>bootstrapping the files eval.c and gbc.c are the two which are
>exercised the most.  By compiling eval.c with the 4.03 compiler I was
>able to compile cmplam.lsp 270 times with only 1 failure.  Still one
>failure is too many.  When I compiled all files with the 4.03 compiler
>I compiled cmplam.lsp 700 times (3 days), with no failures--so I
>believe that compiler/code combination is ok.  I have tried on
>sparcstation I,II,and 470 all with the same result.  I have tried
>different disks, server and non server.  These problems do nor occur
>with sun3's, hps (risc or not) ibms etc.

	Have you isolated the problem. If not I have some simple
(probably dumb) questions. Were the sources you were compiling on the
same machine (ie on a local disk)? If not, could this be an NFS problem.
Could you be running out of swap space? My problem with what you
describe is that compilers are rather regular beasts (at least on
single CPU systems). If they fail, they should fail all the time. We
have had problems on our SPARCs with the network and NFS. Things get
hung, dropped and sometimes garbled.

					Hope this helps,

						Paul Harmon