Bug#1093200: Some packages consistently FTBFS with EFAULT (Bad address) on most mips64el buildds

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 Some packages consistently FTBFS with EFAULT (Bad address) on most mips64el buildds
Control: affects -1 + rustc src:librsvg src:swayosd src:git src:wings3d
Control: tags -1 + help

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 at 12:40:07 +0100, Fabian Grünbichler wrote:
> > Matthias Geiger <werdahias at riseup.net> hat am 16.01.2025 11:55 CET geschrieben:
> > On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 11:45, Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:
> > >The error message "failed to acquire jobserver token" seems to come from
> > >rustc or cargo, so I think this FTBFS bug should probably be reassigned
> > >to rustc for investigation by the mips64el porting team.
> >
> > This is a known bug on mips64el with rust.
>
> git triggered it in a unit test as well with no rust involved:
> 
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=git&arch=mips64el&ver=1%3A2.45.2-1.2&stamp=1731806317&raw=0 (grep for 'bad address')
...
> I kind of assumed all of the above are the same underlying
> (hardware?) issue, and cargo just has a particular code/memory access
> pattern that triggers it more often

Yes, I think this does look like a more general mips64el
problem, which is certainly not a bug in librsvg specifically,
and probably not a bug in rustc either. This should probably be
reassigned to some suitable pseudo-package, but I don't know which
one (general? release.debian.org? ...) so for now I'm leaving it with
librsvg.

This is also preventing at least git from migrating to testing, if I'm
reading correctly. cc'ing the release team for visibility.

git has failed the majority of its builds on mips64el since 2023-12-31.
Doing a spot check on the failing build logs, I see:

> fatal: read error: Bad address
> fatal: error in sideband demultiplexer

or

> fatal: read error: Bad address
> fatal: early EOF

in most of them. The fact that git basically works on every other
architecture would seem to point to this being something mips64el-specific,
either specific to these particular buildds (which I know we have had
problems with in the past) or a more general architecture/kernel/toolchain
problem.

wings3d also has a mips64el-specific build failure with a suspiciously
similar message:

> signal-dispatcher thread got unexpected error: efault (14)

I don't think it's fair to expect the maintainers of these particular
packages to be responsible for the health of mips64el.

    smcv