Error "Too many open files" when creating universal image

[Sporif]

I'm getting this error fairly often when creating a universal image with strip enabled, lines like:
/usr/lib/modules/rmd256.ko: pipe2: too many open files or
/usr/lib/modules/842_compress.ko: open /dev/null: too many open files

[anatol]

It happens because you build a universal image (i.e. it contains a lot of modules) and strip option enabled. When many strip commands are executed in parallel then it requires many files (binaries, shared libraries, etc) to be open.

Current open file limit is ridiculously low, it is something like 1024 files (ulimit -n). Opening many files leads to this limit exhaustion.

To avoid this error message please increase the file limit https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Limits.conf (option nofile) to something more reasonable (8192 at least).

Or you can disable strip option.

[mvdan]

FYI, Go 1.19 will do this for you automatically: golang/go#46279

Perhaps worth adding a TODO to remove your workaround in a year or two, once you can drop support for Go 1.18 and older. Then there's less code to maintain :)

[anatol]

Good to know about the upcoming 1.19 change. Thanks for pointing it out.