July 23, 2009, 12:42 pm
If you happen to be on an AIX 5.x host using Gentoo Prefix. Then you might see something like this eventually:
/bin/sh[3]: /home/jolexa/portage/aix-5.3/bin/chmod: arg list too long
This is caused by build systems that use wildcards or even ebuilds that have no issues on a normal GNU/Linux system. To work around this, you need to change the ARG/ENV list size in 4K byte blocks. The default value in AIX 5.x is 6. This is way too small. You will either need root access or kindly ask your system administrator to change this value. To change it, you have two options: use smitty (a curses sys-admin tool on AIX) or do root# chdev -l sys0 -a ncargs=40 on the command line
If you use smitty, you are looking for this:
root# smitty
=> System Environments
=> Change / Show Characteristics of Operating System
ARG/ENV list size in 4K byte blocks [40]
40 seems to be a good number. It would be hard to guess the smallest number possible. This is not a problem in AIX 6.1, because the default seems to be ’256′
February 5, 2009, 5:20 pm
Gentoo Prefix now supports Itanium Linux and AIX-6.1 (with caveats).
ia64-linux mostly works out of the box. There is one small issue with scanelf which I would like to fix if I ever find the time. (‘scanelf(9292): unaligned access to …’ – low priority because everything still appears to work). We previously supported ia64-linux but it was removed because we didn’t think anyone used it – and no one responded when we asked. It was added back, by me, to support a work endeavour.
AIX-6.1 – whew..this one was a pain to bootstrap a prefix env. I took the lazy way and put my AIX-5.3 prefix last in my PATH so I had working tools to start with. Now, after I got it all working, there is some sort of hiccup with bash/python(?). Something is causing something to hang when python’s workdir is trying to get cleaned up after the emerge. There is a hanging file descriptor out there (.nfs). Again, not easy to debug. (Don’t even bother telling me about lsof, I know, I know…). So AIX-6.1 works, but maybe not very well. YMMV 
As a side note, we are up to ~2100 packages in the prefix tree thanks to some helpful Prefix users.
