out of memory: : Invalid argument when running ponyc

[moustache-de-proust]

Hi all - new to pony,

I'm having difficulty running ponyc (mac os big sur 11.4) built from source (main branch).

./ponyc 
out of memory: : Invalid argument
zsh: abort      ./ponyc

lldb backtrace:

Process 17498 launched: '.../ponyc/build/release/ponyc' (x86_64)
out of memory: : Invalid argument
Process 17498 stopped
* thread #1, queue = 'com.apple.main-thread', stop reason = signal SIGABRT
    frame #0: 0x00007fff204e892e libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill + 10
libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill:
->  0x7fff204e892e <+10>: jae    0x7fff204e8938            ; <+20>
    0x7fff204e8930 <+12>: movq   %rax, %rdi
    0x7fff204e8933 <+15>: jmp    0x7fff204e2ad9            ; cerror_nocancel
    0x7fff204e8938 <+20>: retq   
Target 0: (ponyc) stopped.
(lldb) bt
* thread #1, queue = 'com.apple.main-thread', stop reason = signal SIGABRT
  * frame #0: 0x00007fff204e892e libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill + 10
    frame #1: 0x00007fff205175bd libsystem_pthread.dylib`pthread_kill + 263
    frame #2: 0x00007fff2046c411 libsystem_c.dylib`abort + 120
    frame #3: 0x00000001014c9815 ponyc`ponyint_virt_alloc.cold.1 + 21
    frame #4: 0x00000001000c55d1 ponyc`ponyint_virt_alloc + 49
    frame #5: 0x00000001000c79e2 ponyc`pool_alloc_pages + 530
    frame #6: 0x00000001000bf8f8 ponyc`ponyint_hashmap_init + 88
    frame #7: 0x0000000100005281 ponyc`main + 33
    frame #8: 0x00007fff20532f5d libdyld.dylib`start + 1

Has anyone experienced this issue? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[ergl]

Hi @moustache-de-proust, is this on an intel, or arm macOS? There have been some reports of oom errors from the homebrew people before, but haven't managed to reproduce it.

[moustache-de-proust]

Hi @ergl thanks for getting back to me.

It's on intel.

I was getting the oom from homebrew as well. I then tried installing using ponyup also getting the oom error. So I decided to build from source.

After some investigation it turns out that the flag VM_FLAGS_SUPERPAGE_SIZE_ANY
in ..src/libponoyrt/mem/alloc.c:31 was the source of the error. Commenting it out results in ponyc binary that executes.

I dug a little deeper and noticed ld warnings relating to "object file ... was built for newer macOS version (11.0) than being linked (10.12)" when running make build.

Subsequently passing the variable MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=11.0 when running the make build command results in a binary that executes with no oom error.

[SeanTAllen]

Thanks for looking into this @moustache-de-proust.

Questions

• is MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=11.0 by itself sufficient?
• is turning off VM_FLAGS_SUPERPAGE_SIZE_ANY without any other changes sufficient?

[SeanTAllen]

Ok, I've found we can trigger this in CI using xcode 12.5. our CI is currently 12.4 and it doesn't have the problem.

[moustache-de-proust]

ah ok i see @SeanTAllen and to answer your previous question:

• MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=11.0 by itself is sufficient
• turning off VM_FLAGS_SUPERPAGE_SIZE_ANY without any other changes is also sufficient (although of course ld warning is still present)

[SeanTAllen]

interesting. MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET is an LLVM option.

[SeanTAllen]

@ergl I'm going to turn off super pages. It needs to go away for m1 support anyway and if its now an issue with latest xcode then I think we should turn it off. It will hurt performance on older macOS versions but, given its not a server platform, I think that's a reasonable trade-off.

The problem with setting MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET is that we build a single ponyc binary for all MacOS versions so while it might work for end users, it doesn't really help for distributing a version of the compiler that works on more than BigSur.

[ergl]

@SeanTAllen Sounds fine to me, let's remove the superpages flag

[SeanTAllen]

@moustache-de-proust thanks for diagnosing this. Quite the intro into the community. There will be a fix on main soon.

[moustache-de-proust]

@SeanTAllen no problem - thanks for pushing a fix so quickly. Looking forward to developing with pony and getting involved in the community.

[SeanTAllen]

@moustache-de-proust how did you set MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET env variable on command line?

I'm thinking we should set it to our minimum API version when building our releases to avoid the annoying error message. And perhaps include in our build instructions for MacOS.