th...@vmware.com wrote: > We are using Gnu Make 4.1 from a somewhat recent installation of > msys2 as part of a very large build system.
Saying msys2 tells me that you are running on MS-Windows. > We are periodically seeing: > > make: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable > > We don't know the specific conditions to reproduce the mesasge, > yet. Your system is out of memory. It cannot fork. The message says temporary because it isn't a hard fatal error. If memory were available then it would work. Therefore it is a temporary failure. In a Unix process model new programs are spawned by using two system calls back to back. The first is fork() and the second is exec(). First the process forks to create two copies, a parent and a child. Then the child calls exec() to launch the new process. In your case above the fork() is failing. (It would normaly immediately be followed by an exec() of a new process and therefore the memory needed might immediately go down. But at the time of the fork that isn't known yet.) You might want to read over a man page for more details. Here is one. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fork&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+10.3-RELEASE&arch=default&format=html To avoid this error the system needs enough virtual memory to avoid the failure. Either the system is doing too much (too many processes doing too many large things) or it doesn't have enough to do what it is doing. To increase virtual memory it is easiest is to add more swap space. Better is to add more ram. In either case the system is beyond its available resources. If the machine is doing too much then try to move tasks onto other systems so that this one isn't doing as much. Or spread them out in time. Instead of doing a lot all at once spread the tasks out so that it is only doing a little at a time. Or now that you know it is just out of memory maybe you already know what can be done on your system to get it through things. Bob _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list Help-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make
