Definitely.

Actually I had my real-world case in mind, so let me explain further with the following snippet:

let myfun = doSomeWork (); myref := List.filter somefilterfunction !myref in

List.iter myfun !myref

In this case, a new linked list is created in each iteration of the List.filter. (that is, a new list allocation)

Then, if doSomeWork () does a lot of work and lots of allocations, the GC will be called on a regular basis while in function myfun.

Then List.iter is tail-recursive, so it doesn’t push its successive arguments on the stack. So the successively created myref become unreachable while still iterating on them.

So my question is, how does the GC know whether all these myref created throughout the iteration are collectable or not? I’m curious about how these myref are tagged/untagged by the garbage collector. Maybe pointing me the relevant portions of the ocamlrun source code would be nice.

Anyway no worries, once I get a bit more free I’ll just try to read about this topic by myself. Also I’ll try to send you some source code for that. All this will take me a little while, so see you next time!

From: David Allsopp [mailto:dra-news@metastack.com]
Sent: samedi 8 août 2009 19:25
To: 'ivan chollet'
Cc: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr
Subject: RE: [Caml-list] Re: ocaml sefault in bytecode: unanswered questions

When you pass a value to a function, you create a pointer to that value in the OCaml runtime – the GC can’t collect the old value until List.iter completes because the value is still live (internally, it’s part of a local root but, in practice, as List.iter is implemented in OCaml directly it’s because an OCaml function parameter references the value). Note that in this example:

let a = [1; 2; 3]

and b = [4; 5; 6]

and c = [7; 8; 9] in

let myref = ref a in

(* No allocations are done after here *)

  myref := a;

  myref := b;

  myref := c;;

the assignments to [myref] do not result in any memory being allocated at all (my point is that action of assigning to a reference does not implicitly result in an allocation).

David

From: caml-list-bounces@yquem.inria.fr [mailto:caml-list-bounces@yquem.inria.fr] On Behalf Of ivan chollet
Sent: 08 August 2009 18:10
To: ivan.chollet@free.fr
Cc: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr
Subject: [Caml-list] Re: ocaml sefault in bytecode: unanswered questions

Yes it was a freebsd 6.4 with ocaml 3.10.2

I’ll run the program on linux later and see how it goes.

Thanks for your advices regarding debugging. I pretty much tried all of these though… the thing is my error is not an ocaml error at runtime but an error of the ocaml runtime. And to analyze a core dump of ocamlrun, I just thought my best bet was gdb. Whatever.

OK I’ll try to provide you with a minimal ocaml code that produce an ocamlrun error. Might take a little while as I’m not free.

In the meantime, I’ve got a newbie question regarding ocaml garbage collector and the same List.iter stuff:

Say you do a “List.iter myfun !myref”, where !myref is a list (hehe…), and where myfun is a function that does reallocations of myref (that is affectations like myref := [some new or old objects]). The pointers myref that are generated through this process are destroyed each time a new reallocation of myref is done. Of course the underlying linked lists that are not referenced anymore shouldn’t be collected by the GC before the end of the main “List.iter”, otherwise it’s iterating through a linked list that has been garbage collected.

My question is: does the GC know that it cannot collect the unreferenced myref pointers before the end of the List.iter?

Sorry, I just wanted to ask this question to rule it out.

Thanks again.

On 07-08-2009, ivan chollet <ivan.chollet@free.fr> wrote:

>

> This GDB was configured as "i386-marcel-freebsd"...(no debugging symbols

> found)...

>

> Not very informative. So here are my questions:

I suppose you are running freebsd ? Which version of freebsd, of ocaml ?

>

> 

>

> -          What is the best way to produce and analyze core dumps in ocaml?

> Should I compile in bytecode or native? Is there any special gdb "trick"

> that gives you more information? Is there any special "trick" while

> compiling the ocaml runtime to make it throw more information?

>

gdb is not the perfect tool to debug ocaml program. You should give a

try to ocamldebug which is a better option for bytecode (see below for

options). Bytecode is more informative when coming to reporting

backtrace (at least with old version of ocaml).

Compile every program with "-g" option (just like gcc).

If you have compiled everything with "-g" option, you can also use the

environment variable OCAMLRUNPARAM="b" to get a backtrace for your

exception, at runtime.

> -          Then, my main question is actually: in bytecode, what can produce

> segfaults? My ocaml code is completely standard, excepted that I use the

> Marshal module. So my question is rather: outside the Marshal module, what

> can cause segfault?

Some part of the bytecode are just standard C, everything can cause a

segfault just as C. These errors are not very common but it is possible

that some case are not well handled on freebsd. Most probably a porting

issue.

Marshal module can easily trigger a segfault when you map the loaded data

to a type which doesn't match the dumped data.

Example:

List.length (Marshal.from_string (Marshal.to_string 1234 []) 0);;

Here the integer value is marshalled and then unmarshalled as a list ->

segfault.

>

> -          Slightly unrelated question: I have been able to generate

> segfaults by running ocaml code that: 1) iterates recursively through a list

> reference 2) changes the reference while still iterating on it. For example,

> you just do a "List.iter myfun !myref", and within the function myfun, you

> do stuff like "myref := List.filter somefilterfunction !myref". It is not

> good to program like this, but for some reason I thought ocaml would not

> segfault on that. Is this expected behavior? If it's not, I'll be happy to

> provide some simple source code that illustrates it. (nevermind I have

> actually cleaned all my code base from these dirty uses of references)

>

Could you provide a minimal example code for this error ? I don't think

this should generate a segfault.

Regards

Sylvain Le Gall