Buiding CockroachDB for RPi yields 'segmentation violation error'

Question

I am trying to build CockroachDB from sources on a RPi 3, following a couple of posts (this and this).

My RaspberryPi setup:

OS: 2018-06-27-raspbian-stretch

CPU: ARMv7 rev 4(v71)

Mem: 1G + SWAP: 1.5G

Go version: go1.11 linux/arm

I fixed a couple of errors regarding 3rd party libraries while 'make'ing it but now I got stuck on this:

pi@raspberrypi:~/work/go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach $ make build TAGS='stdmalloc' -j2
GOPATH set to /home/pi/work/go
go build -o cockroach -v  -tags 'stdmalloc make arm_linux_gnueabihf_stdmalloc' -ldflags '-X github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/build.typ=development -extldflags "" -X "github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/build.tag=v2.2.0-alpha.00000000-668-gf76d921f42-dirty" -X "github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/build.rev=f76d921f4262356fde83312d0f471262d995f1e0" -X "github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/build.cgoTargetTriple=arm-linux-gnueabihf"   -X "github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/build.utcTime=2018/09/11 12:47:32"' ./pkg/cmd/cockroach
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0x2372b8]

goroutine 1 [running]:
runtime/internal/atomic.goLoad64(0x3d65bdc, 0x0, 0x5607a20)
/usr/local/go/src/runtime/internal/atomic/atomic_arm.go:124 +0x1c
github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/util/humanizeutil.(*BytesValue).String(0x55fb578, 0x5607a01, 0x56d9ea0)
/home/pi/work/go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/util/humanizeutil/humanize.go:109 +0x28
github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/cli.(*bytesOrPercentageValue).String(0x57b4920, 0x56d9ea0, 0x7)
/home/pi/work/go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/cli/flags_util.go:492 +0x20
github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/vendor/github.com/spf13/pflag.(*FlagSet).VarPF(0x54d3a00, 0x25cf778, 0x57b4920, 0x1ef3864, 0xe, 0x0, 0x0, 0x56d2900, 0x169, 0x56d9ea0)
/home/pi/work/go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/vendor/github.com/spf13/pflag/flag.go:778 +0x24
github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/vendor/github.com/spf13/pflag.(*FlagSet).VarP(0x54d3a00, 0x25cf778, 0x57b4920, 0x1ef3864, 0xe, 0x0, 0x0, 0x56d2900, 0x169)
/home/pi/work/go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/vendor/github.com/spf13/pflag/flag.go:786 +0x5c
github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/cli.VarFlag(0x54d3a00, 0x25cf778, 0x57b4920, 0x1ef3864, 0xe, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x1fa4462, ...)
/home/pi/work/go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/cli/flags.go:129 +0x6c
github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/cli.init.5()
/home/pi/work/go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/cli/flags.go:324 +0x6c0
Makefile:1288: recipe for target 'docs/generated/settings/settings.html' failed
make: *** [docs/generated/settings/settings.html] Error 2
make: *** Deleting file 'docs/generated/settings/settings.html'

Any ideas what might be wrong?

With no code to look at, this is difficult, if not impossible, to answer. If you're just trying to build someone else's project without familiarity with the code, and running into issues, contact the project maintainer and/or file a bug report with them. — Adrian
What 'code to look', it's written in Golang, it has 50Mb of source code and uses ~50 3rd party libs. The question is related to buiding it from sources, it's an open source...if you have no XP with this open source projects, please ask before.. — Lucian
It's like saying give me the sources from QT, I want to look over it to see where the problem is..It's an open source sw and you can build it on various platforms... — Lucian
But if you have no familiarity with the code, if you're asking about a build problem with no concept of the underlying code problem, you're basically asking the community to read that 50MB of source for you. Which is why I suggest instead reaching out to the project's maintainers instead of SO. — Adrian
Note that the stack trace shows you where the error is: /home/pi/work/go/src/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/util/humanizeutil/humanize.go:109. This looks like a bug in that program, and is probably better reported on their issue tracker. — Martin Tournoij

Nathan VanBenschoten Nathan VanBenschoten · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-13T16:57:45

thanks for the question. I was the original author of that blog post. It looks like you're running into an issue related to https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9959. It looks like golang requires 64-bit alignment of 64-bit words when atomically accessed. This is somewhat tricky to enforce across an entire project. Still, we can try to get this working by removing the atomic access on pkg/util/humanizeutil/humanize.go:109 (which doesn't look necessary) and replacing it with return IBytes(*b.val). That should at least get you past this roadblock. There may be other issues you run into after this though. Unfortunately, CockroachDB has never set up CI around a 32-bit ARMv7 build because 32-bit architectures have never been officially supported by the project.

However, a 64-bit ARMv8 build is more actively maintained. In fact, an entire cross-compilation toolchain has been introduced to build CockroachDB for ARMv8 on an x86_64 host. Compilation using this toolchain can be kicked off by running build/builder.sh mkrelease arm64-linux-gnueabi. The resulting binary can be dropped onto a RaspberryPi running a 64-bit OS like https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi3. I actually tried this out last week and ran into no problems.

Buiding CockroachDB for RPi yields 'segmentation violation error'

1 Answers