`cmake` build failure on x86_64 macOS 14 with `-DDYNAMIC_ARCH=ON` and `-DBUILD_STATIC_LIBS=ON`

[ywwry66]

The failure was seen in Homebrew/homebrew-core#219339. It was caused by too many arguments (*.o files) being passed to ar.

Specifically, the cmake options used are

-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON
-DBUILD_STATIC_LIBS=ON
-DNUM_THREADS=64
-DTARGET=NEHALEM
-DDYNAMIC_ARCH=ON

The problematic ar call looks like

/usr/bin/ar qc lib/libopenblas.a interface/CMakeFiles/interface.dir/CMakeFiles/scopy.c.o interface/CMakeFiles/interface.dir/CMakeFiles/snrm2.c.o .......

which has over 1000000 characters, due to large amount of object files. And the error message is:

collect2: fatal error: posix_spawnp: Argument list too long

[martin-frbg]

Line 303 and following of the toplevel CMakeLists.txt has code that should switch to using a response file when the objects line is likely to become too long for MacOS. However, someone added a host version check to that code about two years ago, stating that this was no longer necessary on anything newer than Big Sur.

Could you please try if removing the AND CMAKE_HOST_SYSTEM_VERSION VERSION_LESS 20 from the conditional fixes your build ?

[ywwry66]

Thanks for the pointer. It seems the workaround is not needed by apple silicon, but still needed by intel processors. Furthermore, it is not sufficient since the Argument list too long error not only occurs for the shared library, but also the static library.

[martin-frbg]

I guess it is possible that the continuing addition of new functions to LAPACK has pushed even the static build over the command line limit. There is probably no drawback to using response files by default on MacOS/x86 - can you confirm that compilation/linking succeeds with that change ?

[ywwry66]

I am not sure how to properly enable response files for static build. For dynamic build, at least two things need to be addressed: 1. -noall_load is not recognized by the linker and should be removed. 2. openmp flags are not included in the linker invocation.