Bazel build fails with "Executing genrule @six_archive//:copy_six failed" error while building syntaxnet

Question

I'm trying to follow the instructions at syntaxnet's github page to build syntaxnet parser models.

My system is a Debian Wheezy. Shouldn't be very different from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or 15.05. I have compiled bazel 0.2.2 (as opposed to 0.2.2b) from source and it appears to work correctly.

Whenever I launch the bazel test syntaxnet/... util/utf8/... command, no tests are executed (all skipped) with some quite cryptic error messages. Here's an example:

root@host:~/tensorflow_syntaxnet/models/syntaxnet# ../../bazel/output/bazel test syntaxnet/... util/utf8/...
Extracting Bazel installation...
.............
INFO: Found 65 targets and 12 test targets...
ERROR: /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/74c6bab7a21f28ad02405b720243d086/external/six_archive/BUILD:1:1: Executing genrule @six_archive//:copy_six failed: namespace-sandbox failed: error executing command /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/74c6bab7a21f28ad02405b720243d086/syntaxnet/_bin/namespace-sandbox ... (remaining 5 argument(s) skipped).
unshare failed with EINVAL even after 101 tries, giving up.
INFO: Elapsed time: 95.469s, Critical Path: 22.46s
//syntaxnet:arc_standard_transitions_test                             NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:beam_reader_ops_test                                      NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:graph_builder_test                                        NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:lexicon_builder_test                                      NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:parser_features_test                                      NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:parser_trainer_test                                       NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:reader_ops_test                                           NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:sentence_features_test                                    NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:shared_store_test                                         NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:tagger_transitions_test                                   NO STATUS
//syntaxnet:text_formats_test                                         NO STATUS
//util/utf8:unicodetext_unittest                                      NO STATUS

Executed 0 out of 12 tests: 12 were skipped.

I'm using Oracle Java 8 JDK as recommended, and my compiler is:

~/tensorflow_syntaxnet/models/syntaxnet# gcc --version
gcc (Debian 4.7.2-5) 4.7.2
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Tried looking into the namespace-sandbox binary that's mentioned in the error message, but before I dive deep into this, I thought I'd ask here.

~/tensorflow_syntaxnet/models/syntaxnet# ls -l /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/74c6bab7a21f28ad02405b720243d086/syntaxnet/_bin/namespace-sandbox
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 108 May 13 14:52 /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/74c6bab7a21f28ad02405b720243d086/syntaxnet/_bin/namespace-sandbox -> /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/install/ca381eaad1c931167a6355cb8a2b98cf/_embedded_binaries/namespace-sandbox
~/tensorflow_syntaxnet/models/syntaxnet# readlink /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/74c6bab7a21f28ad02405b720243d086/syntaxnet/_bin/namespace-sandbox
/root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/install/ca381eaad1c931167a6355cb8a2b98cf/_embedded_binaries/namespace-sandbox

Command seems to work fine though:

~/tensorflow_syntaxnet/models/syntaxnet# file $(readlink /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/74c6bab7a21f28ad02405b720243d086/syntaxnet/_bin/namespace-sandbox)
/root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/install/ca381eaad1c931167a6355cb8a2b98cf/_embedded_binaries/namespace-sandbox: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.26, BuildID[md5/uuid]=0xecfd97b6a6b9a193b045be13654bd55b, not stripped
~/tensorflow_syntaxnet/models/syntaxnet# /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/install/ca381eaad1c931167a6355cb8a2b98cf/_embedded_binaries/namespace-sandbox
No command specified.
Usage: /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/install/ca381eaad1c931167a6355cb8a2b98cf/_embedded_binaries/namespace-sandbox [-S sandbox-root] -- command arg1
  provided: /root/.cache/bazel/_bazel_root/install/ca381eaad1c931167a6355cb8a2b98cf/_embedded_binaries/namespace-sandbox
Mandatory arguments:
  -S <sandbox-root>  directory which will become the root of the sandbox
  --  command to run inside sandbox, followed by arguments

Optional arguments:
  -W <working-dir>  working directory
  -T <timeout>  timeout after which the child process will be terminated with SIGTERM
  -t <timeout>  in case timeout occurs, how long to wait before killing the child with SIGKILL
  -d <dir>  create an empty directory in the sandbox
  -M/-m <source/target>  system directory to mount inside the sandbox
    Multiple directories can be specified and each of them will be mounted readonly.
    The -M option specifies which directory to mount, the -m option specifies where to
    mount it in the sandbox.
  -n if set, a new network namespace will be created
  -r if set, make the uid/gid be root, otherwise use nobody
  -D  if set, debug info will be printed
  -l <file>  redirect stdout to a file
  -L <file>  redirect stderr to a file
  @FILE read newline-separated arguments from FILE

Any idea?

UPDATE: I have done exactly the same steps on a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (my small workstation, as opposed to the production server running Debian) and everything works well there, with all tests passing. I wonder what's the difference.

Answer 1

Apparently some permission errors happens when setting up the sandbox. A quick workaround is to deactivate the sandbox by using --genrule_strategy=standalone --spawn_strategy=standalone (note that the second one is already specified in the TensorFlow rc file).

You can set those flag in your ~/.bazelrc: echo "build --genrule_strategy=standalone --spawn_strategy=standalone" >>~/.bazelrc