Thanks everyone for your answers. For the record, I finally understood the cause of my problem: first I noticed that I had no segfault on the same machine replacing my touchpad with a usual mouse. I then wrote a C equivalent of my minimal program, which worked perfectly (also according to valgrind). This basically meant the problem lied in the binding. So I finally checked at the C level every mouse event incoming and saw that there were mouse button events containing unexpected mouse button codes. These codes corresponded to horizontal two finger scrolling, that is indeed not available on a standard mouse, and not incorporated in ocamlsdl API. The thing is that button codes are used directly to encode variants in the binding and, as a consequence used to compute a jump in the pattern matching. So what happened is the following: by using vertical two finger scrolling a bit too fast, I would also generate (unintentionally) an horizontal scrolling event at the end of my move, and right after that do a pattern matching on its variant representation, which triggered a jump in some unexpected zone of memory, leading to either segmentation fault or illegal instruction error.

So, long story short: doing pattern matching on mouse events of ocamlsdl (or the sdl binding of glcaml, by the way) may lead to a crash when using a touchpad. For now I'll use a cheap workaround in my program, but if the authors of ocamlsdl are interested, I'll gladly work on a patch.

cheers,
ph.


2010/12/3 Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr>

On 2010-12-01, at 00:08, Philippe Veber wrote:

> Short story (details below): I'm currently writing a program relying on react, lablgl and ocamlsdl. This program segfaults on my laptop under two linux distributions (ubuntu and gentoo) but doesn't on a PC under ubuntu. The seg fault occurs with both bytecode and native executables. I don't do any marshaling nor use any typing magic; stack overflow is not likely. I humbly ask this list about means to improve valgrind or gdb outputs, which don't report informative function names, or more generally, any tip that could help me to locate the origin of the problem.

You should try to compile the OCaml runtime in debug mode: just "make ocamlrund"
in the ...ocaml/bytecode directory, then run your program with ocamlrund.

> 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 ?

The default space_overhead is already 80.  If you want the major GC
to run very slowly, set the overhead to 1000 or 10000.  But usually
you want to do the opposite, so that the crash happens soon after the
execution of the buggy code.  You can try to pepper your code with
calls to Gc.compact, for example.  In your case, I would call it just
before the pattern matching that crashes mysteriously.

-- Damien

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