From: Bil Kleb <Bil.Kleb@...>
Date: 2004-09-02T23:04:21+09:00
Subject: Update: Compilation fails for Altix (IA64)

Bil Kleb wrote:
> 
> FWIW, I received the following data from the NASA sysadm folks:
> 
>  Here is an update on building ruby.
> 
>  One of our sysadms [..] and I tried a few
>  experiments on building Ruby on our Altix machines.
>  We tried different combinations
>  of (1) two versions of OS, one with SGI ProPack2.4,
>  the other with SGI ProPack3.0, (2) different versions of
>  c compilers, gcc.2.96, gcc.3.2.3, gcc.3.3.1 and Intel ecc 7.0.27,
>  (3) two versions of Ruby, 1.8.1 and 1.8.2-preview.
>  Unfortunately, none of them succeeded.

Their latest experiments:

  With the great help from my colleague,
  we are able to build ruby. Here are the steps we
  took on [the Altix] using ruby-1.8.1:

  (1) modify ext/Setup and uncomment out the first line
      #option nodynamic

  (2) % limit stacksize unlimited
  (3) setenv CC /opt/intel/comp/7.1.027/compiler70/ia64/bin/ecc
  (4) ./configure
  (5) make

  We tried using gcc, but it did not work.

But our Fortran dependency code fails due to a lack of available
stack levels.  The following little bit demonstrates the behavior:

% cat > helloLevel.rb
def helloLevel level
   puts "hello world! "+level.to_s
   helloLevel(level+1)
end

helloLevel 0
[Ctrl-D]

% /path/to/ruby-1.8.1/ruby ./helloLevel.rb
hello world! 0
hello world! 1
[snip...]
hello world! 43
hello world! 44
helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel': stack level too deep (SystemStackError)
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
          ... 33 levels...
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:4:in `helloLevel'
         from helloLevel.rb:7

My x86 linux box can get to a recursion level of 3886
before stopping.

Thanks,
-- 
Bil Kleb, Hampton, Virginia