In article <03.04.92.020516.223@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu> wjb@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu (Bill Bogstad) writes:
quoted text
>
>       I have a 8 Meg system and also am having problems compiling fork.c.
>I would have thought that would have been sufficient....

Ok, the problem isn't memory: it's gcc-1.40.  For some strange reason
the older gcc runs out of registers when optimizing some of the files in
the linux source distribution, and dies.  This one isn't the same bug as
the "unknown insn" which was due to my hacks in the earlier 1.40 - this
one seems to be a genuine gcc bug. 

Linux 0.95a is compileable with the older gcc if you just add the flag
"-fcombine-regs" to the command line.  In fact, the only thing you need
to do is to remove a "#" from the makefiles: the line

#GCC_OPT = -fcombine-regs

should be uncommented, and gcc-1.40 will have no problems compiling the
source.  This was documented in some of the release-notes for 0.95, but
I guess I forgot it for 0.95a. 

Why remove the flag in the first place I hear you say? Simply because
gcc-2 doesn't understand -fcombine-regs, as it seems to do the
optimizations even without asking.  There are other things I had to
change in the source to get gcc-2 to compile it, but this is the only
problem that made the old gcc choke. 

With the advent of an official gcc-2.1 (this weekend?), people might
want to change to that one: note however that gcc-2.1 is about twice as
big as 1.40, so it's going to be slower on machines that swap...  People
with just 2M of mem might not want to upgrade (*).  I like the changes
to 2.1: the code quality seems to be a lot better (esp floating point). 

On a slightly related note: the as-binary in newgcc has been reported by
several people to have problems.  Getting as from the original
gcc-distribution by me (gccbin.tar.Z) might be a good idea if you have
problems with the newgcc version.

                Linus

(*) Even with only 2M of mem, using gcc-2 has it's good points. The
shared libraries should cut down on memory use as well as loading time
and disk-space use. Shared libraries work even with 1.40 if you know how
to build them, but 2.1 does it all automatically...