Steve wrote:
It seems there are still some people with the misfortune of using
Win98, so I ruined a perfectly good weekend finding why so many
people have trouble running mspgcc on Win98.
[SNIP]
Any input to resolve this would be much appreciated.
I have had the misfortune of using Win98 for the past many, many
years as a development platform for the Salvo RTOS and the various
compilers it supports. Yes, we do use Win2k for Salvo library builds
in Cygwin, but we are (well, were, actually) stuck with Win98 for
other reasons. I now have a big, fast Win2k machine ready and I can't
wait to migrate to it ...
Anyway, all I can do is lend a little insight into the Cygwin
problem. Up to somewhere between 6 and 12 months ago, Cygwin had a
problem with calling make recursively (our library-building makefiles
use make recursively). The symptom would be that on a Win2k PC with
512MB, make would crash after 5-6 hours of building libraries (there
are a LOT of Salvo libraries). Task Manager would show that memory
was clearly exhausted. On Win98 w/512MB, it would happen even sooner
(maybe within 1-2 hours). Plus, it was sloooooooooow on Win98.
I posted to the Cywgin "forums", but as I am not well-versed in shell
intricacies, I wasn't able to provide much more information. It was
acknowledged that this was some sort of problem, but not much was
actively done, because few could reproduce the problem.
(As a side note, I noticed that one of the compilers we support
(Archelon / Quadravox AQ430) has a return-code behavior that is
incompatible with Cygwin yet is OK in DOS and MinGW. However, this
does not lead to crashes, just make exiting with an error.)
Anyway, I kept up with new Cygwin releases and now, to my pleasant
surprise, on both Win2k and Win98, Cygwin no longer exhibits this
memory leak associated with recursive make. Also, it appears to me
that our builds on Win98 are much faster than before (though still no
match for Win2k). I no longer have to reboot PCs after making a few
Salvo libraries.
So, to summarize, Cygwin definitely had a make-related memory leak at
one time. It is now gone. I have no idea what made it go away. I
suspect it was something in the course of Cygwin's development /
updates. Maybe it's part of the problem you are experiencing. I never
built Cygwin, just installed the latest release.
Regards,
--
______________________________________
Andrew E. Kalman, Ph.D. [email protected]
