macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 crashes when MacPorts tries to install p5.28-locale-gettext

[Nils Breunese]

Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:

> On Nov 13, 2020, at 18:34, Nils Breunese wrote:
> 
>> Nils Breunese wrote:
>> 
>>> Every time MacPorts tries to install the p5.28-locale-gettext port on my Big Sur 11.0.1 machine, the OS crashes and the Problem Reporter shows the crash report below. Does installing this port work for others on Big Sur 11.0.1? Any ideas?
>>> 
>>> [cut]
>> 
>> I can reproduce the crash by running 'sudo port install p5.28-locale-gettext' and waiting for approximately 3 minutes, which seems to correspond to the 180 seconds from the error in the crash report ("panic(cpu 8 caller 0xffffff8003753a13): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.remoted in 180 seconds”).
>> 
>> I found this crash also occurs when trying to install p5.28-error, so it might actually be a problem related to all perl5 modules.
>> 
>> Debug output:
>> 
>> % sudo port -d install p5.28-locale-gettext
>> [cut]
>> --->  Fetching distfiles for p5.28-locale-gettext
>> DEBUG: Executing org.macports.fetch (p5.28-locale-gettext)
>> --->  gettext-1.07.tar.gz does not exist in /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/perl5
>> 
>> And then nothing happens for about 3 minutes and then the machine reboots and comes back with the crash report from the original post.
> 
> Sounds like maybe another consequence of the massive number of processes that MacPorts starts when trying to determine which of the hundreds of perl master_sites is closest to you. See:
> 
> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/60509

I indeed saw about 123 ping processes running while trying to fetch p5.28-locale-gettext.

> We added some some code to mitigate that in MacPorts 2.6.3, reducing the number of processes by 2/3:
> 
> https://github.com/macports/macports-base/commit/cee74bb45141be217449c04ee0acd4cb22042dbe
> 
> We added further code to limit the number of processes to 50, but that has only been committed to master, so it is not currently scheduled to appear before MacPorts 2.7.0:
> 
> https://github.com/macports/macports-base/commit/0a000c436ce0f8bc7da7bb34efad896dca6a1e59
> 
> Your log shows you're using MacPorts "2.6.4", which hasn't been released yet, so you must be using the release-2.6 branch. Try either adding the above commit to it or building master instead and see if that helps.

I indeed installed MacPorts on Big Sur 11.0.1 via the latest state of the release-2.6 branch, because the 2.6.3 release failed to build.

I just installed MacPorts from master and indeed saw the number of ping processes was limited to 50 now. But my machine still crashed after hanging for 3 minutes on '--->  gettext-1.07.tar.gz does not exist in /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/perl5’.

Nils.