I just applied PSU 3 for 11.2.0.1 on AIX 5.3 TL11. That would have been more straight forward, had there not been a host of errors when relinking oracle. There were loads of these:
SEVERE:OPatch invoked as follows: 'apply ' INFO: Oracle Home : /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0.1 Central Inventory : /u01/app/oracle/product/oraInventory from : /etc/oraInst.loc OPatch version : 11.2.0.1.3 OUI version : 11.2.0.1.0 OUI location : /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0.1/oui Log file location : /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0.1/cfgtoollogs/opatch/opatch2010-11-01_09-28-22AM.log ... [more output] ... INFO:Running make for target ioracle INFO:Start invoking 'make' at Mon Nov 01 09:29:26 GMT 2010Mon Nov 01 09:29:26 GMT 2010 INFO:Finish invoking 'make' at Mon Nov 01 09:29:40 GMT 2010 WARNING:OUI-67215: OPatch found the word "error" in the stderr of the make command. Please look at this stderr. You can re-run this make command. Stderr output: ld: 0711-415 WARNING: Symbol ldxdts is already exported. ld: 0711-415 WARNING: Symbol ldxsto is already exported. ld: 0711-415 WARNING: Symbol lnxadd is already exported. ... ld: 0711-319 WARNING: Exported symbol not defined: cout__3std ... ld: 0711-224 WARNING: Duplicate symbol: .kotgscid ... ld: 0711-783 WARNING: TOC overflow. TOC size: 219488 Maximum size: 65536 Extra instructions are being generated for each reference to a TOC symbol if the symbol is in the TOC overflow area.
Wow, that looked like a completely corrupted installation of Oracle now, and I got ready to roll the change back. However, MOS had an answer to this!
These errors can be ignored as per this MOS document: Relinking causes many warning on AIX [ID 1189533.1]. See also MOS note Note 245372.1 TOC overflow Warning Can Safely Be Ignored and BUG:9828407 – TOO MANY WARNING MESSAGES WHEN INSTALLING ORACLE 11.2 for more information.
Martins Blog 
Responses
Martin
You may find that issuing
export LDFLAGS=”-Wl,-bbigtoc”
before the opatch command will suppress the TOC warning (actually get around it). The others are dumb, but self explanatory, warnings in my view.
Hi Niall,
totally agree, and after checking MOS and using my favourite search engine I came to the same conclusion. Still was a bit worried after looking at all those lines of output …
Martin
Don’t get me wrong – my favourite number of link warnings is zero – anything else is a bug IMO, I don’t like the various “you can safely ignore these invalid objects if…” notes on MOS for various upgrade sql scripts for the same reason. I’m not necessarily convinced that a familiarity with ld is a pre-requisite for a DBA job :).
Hi Martin,
We found similar warning messages while applying PSU2 to GI and DB homes. I must agree that it is rather unsettling to see so many messages. Fortunately these seem to be benign but uncomfortable non the less.
Great blog by the way :)
Thanks,
Leighton
This is still a problem in 11.2.0.3 with PSU9.
I hate this – I think it is really sloppy porting by Oracle. AIX is still a big platform for the Oracle database, so surely IBM and Oracle can get together and eliminate these warnings. Apart from confusing their customers, there is also the danger that a genuine issue is missed within the spurious messages.
And it’s still a problem in 11.2.0.4, the terminal release, with PSU1 on AIX6.1. Hey ho.