On 23 Aug 2010, at 13:12, Paul Steckler wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Mark Shinwell
> <mshinwell@janestreet.com> wrote:
> 
>> Have you tried using gdb to determine the stack backtrace when it segfaults?
>> Also, if it can be done without disturbing too much code, it might be worth
>> trying to eliminate Dynlink from the program as a test.
> 
> I've already tried gdb, which is how I learned that the segfault
> occurs during a call
> to one of the query functions in my glue module.
> 
> Oh, we just added the Dynlink stuff.  There haven't been any recent
> crashes until
> just now.  That could be an unhappy coincidence; the real issue might
> lurk in unrelated
> code, as you point out.
> 

OCaml's runtime library also has a debug version which performs additional integrity checks on the heap during garbage collection and other operations. This can help catch problems much closer to their source than the production version of the library.  I build it by:

$ cd ocaml-3.11.2/
$ ./configure <usual args>
$ cd asmrun
$ make libasmrund.a
$ cp libasmrund.a /opt/local/lib/ocaml/

Then I swap the installed libasmrun.a with libasmrund.a when a debug version is needed, and replace the original when done.  Regularly calling Gc.compact() helps triggers the additional checks more often.

I'm not sure if there is a way of using the debug version more easily --- libasmrunp.a (the profiling version) is installed by default, but libasmrund.a is not.

-anil