Spurious "write error" on parallel builds

[Carl-Johan Kjellander]

I'm trying to set up a new build system for our company but I've hit a snag. Spurious "write error" keep the compile from happening 95% of the time.

I'm doing 'make -j12' in order to maximize my 8 cores but if I go over -j2, which seems to work most of the time, any more parallelism triggers the "write error" on one of the sub-makes and it stops the build.

Our main makefile is here:
  http://pastebin.com/1Z4iQMyk

The sub-makefile is a variant of:
    https://github.com/klarna/stdapp.mk

Here is a working compile (only happens 5% of the time):
  http://pastebin.com/WHgF1qSA

Here is one that fails on .../mysql and notice that there is no
"make[1]: Entering directory `/home/cjk/git/campanja/superdev/apps/mysql'":

  http://pastebin.com/GsTk7bhJ

Here is one where even the "write error" is missing, it just stops:
  http://pastebin.com/r5RTWZuX

So something is amiss with stdout on heavy parallel builds. All builds were on a fully build directory so I was just checking that nothing else was being built a second time, but the builds all came back with random faults.

System Ubuntu 12.04LTS on x64_86. This happens in both gnome-terminal and in a text-vt so it is not connected to the graphical system.

Any ideas why make has problems with stdout on parallel builds?

/cjk

ps please cc as I'm not on the list.