Re: [Caml-list] Tips to find the cause of a seg fault

[Philippe Veber <philippe.veber@googlemail.com>]

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2010/12/1 Romain Beauxis <toots@rastageeks.org>

> Hi,
>
> Le mardi 30 novembre 2010 17:08:12, Philippe Veber a écrit :
> > The seg fault occurs during the call to this function with the button
> event
> > retrieved by ocamlsdl. What's really weird is that if I comment the third
> > case of the pattern matching, the seg fault does not occur. This is
> strange
> > since with the "assert false" expression, I make sure this case is
> useless
> > (i don't press the left button). Also, in the various tests I made, I
> > obtained different errors, like segmentation fault in caml_absf_mask or
> > invalid instruction error.
>
> The function that triggers the segfault may be confusing, in particular in
> case of a memory corruption, which I suspect here.
> The pattern matching can cause a crash because it is using a value that is
> already corrupted and because the third case is one that, for some random
> conditions, touches the part in memory that is corrupted.
>
How is this possible if it is never reached (no left click) ?


>
> In this case, I would try to unroll the code and see where the value that
> is
> used in this function was instanciated.
>
What do you mean by "unrolling the code" ?



>
> Main source of corruption when using C bindings most often come from either
> the Gc or code executed while the global lock has been released.
>
> In the case of a segfault hapenning during a Gc call, this can be really
> unrelated, for instance the instanciation of a new value triggers a Gc
> collection to compact memory, which in turns triggers the recollection of a
> corrupted value, which causes a segfault.
>
> In the case of a segfault hapenning during a C call while the global lock
> has
> been released, you may get more useful informations through gdb, in
> particular
> the trace of the C code used at the time of the segfault. You need have the
> debugging symbols for the dynamic C libraries used as well.
>
> We experienced a couple of segfault with ocaml SDL too but in unrelated
> parts
> (video). I do not mean to criticize upstream's work on ocaml SDL because I
> know for a fact that these types of bindings are really hard to code.
> However,
> I would suspect an issue there.
>
> Finally, the best approach could be to actually look closely to the
> binding's
> code and try to spot anything fishy there related to your issue. This
> generaly
> worked better for me than trying to get information from gdb and the like..
>

Many thanks for the clarification. Maybe I could (partially) "unplug" the GC
by setting space_overhead to 100 ? That could give an indication on the
moment the problem occurs ?
ph.

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