Mysterious segmentation fault installing ghc 7.10.3

[hasufell]

In GitLab by @andreabedini on Feb 1, 2022, 20:43

Hi there,

I am loving ghcup but I just ran into this on my Ubuntu 21.10. Any idea what can cause it or how I can troubleshoot it further?

[~] ghcup install ghc 7.10.3
[ Info  ] downloading: https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/7.10.3/ghc-7.10.3-x86_64-deb8-linux.tar.bz2 as file /tmp/ghcup-23d985e6f421568b/ghc-7.10.3-x86_64-deb8-linux.tar.bz2
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  133M  100  133M    0     0  3057k      0  0:00:44  0:00:44 --:--:-- 3068k
[ Info  ] verifying digest of: ghc-7.10.3-x86_64-deb8-linux.tar.bz2
[ Info  ] Unpacking: ghc-7.10.3-x86_64-deb8-linux.tar.bz2 to /tmp/ghcup-a338226b2f4807c4
[ Info  ] Installing GHC (this may take a while)
[ ghc-make ] for i in  rts/dist/build/libHSrts.a rts/dist/build/libHSrts_p.a rts/dist/build/libHSrts-ghc7.10.3.so...
[ ghc-make ] "utils/ghc-cabal/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-cabal-bindist" copy libraries/ghc-prim dist-install "str...
[ ghc-make ] Installing library in
[ ghc-make ] /home/andrea/.ghcup/ghc/7.10.3/lib/ghc-7.10.3/ghcpr_8TmvWUcS1U1IKHT0levwg3
[ ghc-make ] gmake[1]: *** [ghc.mk:924: install_packages] Segmentation fault (core dumped)
[ ghc-make ] gmake: *** [Makefile:24: install] Error 2
[ Error ] Process "gmake" with arguments ["install"] failed with exit code 2.
[ Error ] Also check the logs in /home/andrea/.ghcup/logs

EDIT: I can reproduce in a clean Ubuntu 21.10 container.

EDIT2: Reproducible "one-liner"

docker run -it --rm -e BOOTSTRAP_HASKELL_GHC_VERSION=7.10.3 -e BOOTSTRAP_HASKELL_NONINTERACTIVE=1 docker.io/library/ubuntu:21.10 sh -c 'apt update && apt install --yes build-essential curl libffi-dev libffi8ubuntu1 libgmp-dev libgmp10 libncurses-dev libncurses5 libtinfo5 && (curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://get-ghcup.haskell.org | sh)'

[hasufell]

In GitLab by @maerwald on Feb 2, 2022, 06:01

This is a known issue in GHC bindists: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/20782

Unfortunately, it was closed as WONTFIX. I'd also like to know what causes it.

[hasufell]

In GitLab by @andreabedini on Feb 2, 2022, 09:19

:-/ Thanks @maerwald

[mniip]

This is still reproducible when installing GHC 7.10.3, 8.0.2, or 8.2.2 on modern Arch linux x86_64. As discussed in the upstream issue, https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/20782#note_619275 , the exact breaking point seems to be binutils >=2.39.

The workaround is to either use an older binutils, or provide a wrapper script around strip that copies the file, or to disable stripping. To do the latter you can run make install STRIP_CMD=true in the bindist. Thus the ghcup invocation becomes:

ghcup install ghc 7.10.3 --install-targets "install STRIP_CMD=true"

[hasufell]

I don't have a lot of appetite for writing a wrapper script around strip.

That means we'd just disable stripping for all distros, since there's no well-defined interface to figure out what binutils version a system is running.

Since those are all historical GHC versions, I think it's fine to make this compromise.