[tex-k] Metafont on Solaris: putbyte(255) failed

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

; truss -o mf.truss mf
This is METAFONT, Version 2.7182 (Web2C 7.4.5)
**\mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; input mathx10;
(/store/share/texmf/fonts/source/public/mathabx/mathx10.mf
[... omitted various normal-looking output ...]
[159] [173] [174] [175])mf: fatal: putbyte(255) failed.

This is on Sparc Solaris 8 (SunOS 5.8), teTeX 2.0.2.  METAFONT has no
problem building other fonts on this machine, or building this font on
FreeBSD machines (same version of teTeX, and identical metafont
sources - I checked).

Hmm.  From a look at the definition of putbyte in web2c/cpascal.h, it
looks like this must have resulted from putc() returning EOF.

So it could look like a write() failed?  Indeed, there is a truncated
version of mathx10.tfm there, 992 bytes long instead of the 1588 bytes
it should have been.  There is also a truncated gf file.  But the
truss output indicates no failed write (or any other system call that
went fatally wrong), so the problem seems to be internal to the
program, and the reason these files are truncated is just because the
run did not finish.

Any ideas what may have gone wrong?
Maybe I need to recompile with optimization turned down?

- Harald