Dear All,

Any idea what might be going on in the following, please?

I'm installing Gentoo from the latest (20090606, IIRC) installation CD, on a new machine. I followed the handbook as far as attempting to install a kernel with

emerge tuxonice-sources

(I also tried the more standard emerge gentoo-sources, with the same symptoms).

The emerge process (or rather, a process started by it) hangs just after applying patches to the kernel. top reveals that almost all the CPU is being taken up by an attempt to rm something under $(chroot)/var. the exact pathname of the "something" scrolled off-screen before I could catch it, but it looked like it was probably a directory full of patches.

When I killed the rm process, emerge carried on nicely, and put a kernel source tree where I'd expect it, in $(chroot)/usr/src. That kernel configured OK, and at least started to compile OK before I had to leave it to go do my day job.

So what's the problem, apart from that it's kind of inelegant for an install process to hang and need special measures by the user? If this sort of thing happens on other packages too, the stuff that should have been rm'd and hasn't will pretty quickly fill the small partition I've mounted as $(chroot)/var.

Possible explanations welcome.