I had a mysterious-looking problem after installing mspgcc on my Windows machine, and I found no help from the Internet - only fragments of knowledge to work it out. So I quickly scratched this little document. If you have similar problems, I hope this document will help you at least to get started solving the problem. Unfortunately, I have no time to write a commercial-quality troubleshooting guide :-).

I installed MSPGCC from the Sourgeforge site, and tried to make the "leds" example. I got an error messages like:

- init_cheap: Couldn't reserve 3600084 bytes of space for cygwin's heap, Win32 error 487
- vfork: Resource temporarily unavailable
- fork_copy: user/cygwin data pass 2 failed, 0x10010000..0x10312000, done 0, windows pid 4293978333, Win32 error 8

I tried to install cygwin on my computer (I thought that if the problem is some missing DLL-files), it didn't help. After surfing the net and installing and uninstalling stuff, I managed to find the reason to the problem:

The problem was, that many programs install cygwin dll files during their installation. For example, I had installed Asymptote and Gnuarm - both programs did install cygwin dll files in their directories. That's not bad by itself, but cygwin applications (make, for instance) will go crazy, if there are multiple cygwin dll-files in the Windows path-varible.

How to trace the problem?

If you have installed the cygwin environment, you are able to use debug tool called cygcheck. Give command

cygcheck -s -v -r > check.txt

and open the generated file check.txt in your favorite text editor. Search keyword "warning" in the document. Especially, if you find line:

Warning: There are multiple cygwin1.dlls on your path

in the output, multiple DLL files are likely to cause the errors above. The other way to debug the problem is to search file cygwin1.dll on your computer. If you find multiple cygwin1.dll files, that is the likely reason for the error messages.

How to fix the problem

From the start menu, select Control Panel, System, Advanced, Environmental variables. Edit the "PATH" -variable and remove all entries, which point elsewhere from the path of the mspgcc directory (usually it is c:\mspgcc\bin). You don't have to remove the dll files, just alter the path variable.

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Vesa Linja-aho