I’ve been having some problems with my workstation lately, some of which I’ve attributed to running bleeding edge software on a non-mainstream platform. Yes, NetBSD-current on a sparc64 machine is not always a recipe for success. The major problems were bus errors when running certain X applications (primarily fluxbox) and some X applications not building shared libraries.

Before possibly wasting time on issues that had already been resolved, I decided to install a new build. Unfortunately releng haven’t released any new builds since early December, which meant I’d have to build a release myself. No problem, except my regular build system (an SMP i386 NetBSD system) has been overheating of late, so I decided to resort to a native build. Not the fastest (none of my sparc64 systems is particularly fast by modern standards), but at least it’d work.

My first build failed with the following error:
*** Failed target: cp-name-parser.c
*** Failed command: /usr/obj/build/tools/4.99/sparc64/bin/nbyacc -o /nfs/src/export/src/netbsd/current/usr/src/gnu/dist/gdb6/gdb/cp-name-parser.c /nfs/src/export/src/netbsd/current/usr/src/gnu/dist/gdb6/gdb/cp-name-parser.y

Hmm… Not too meaningful. Reasoning that my source tree was out of sync, I updated it and kicked off the build again. Same error.

After much head scratching, I guessed that the paths to the input and output files were possibly too long. The long paths are a result of my slightly convoluted filesystem layout as a result of multiple NFS servers. After a failed attempt to use a null mount (which worked, but for some reason the build still used the underlying location), I resorted to mounting the source tree directly in /usr/src and building from it.

Success!
NetBSD enigma.pimp.org.za 4.99.7 NetBSD 4.99.7 (ENIGMA_499) #1: Sun Dec 31 17:52:25 SAST 2006 root@enigma.pimp.org.za:/usr/obj/sys/compile/ENIGMA_499 sparc64