On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 03:20:41PM -0500, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote: > Stef, > > The only problems I have found are in the unit tests, which somewhere along > the line cause a vm crash. Otherwise, it seems to work. Until it either > proves unstable or otherwise lets me down, I'm trying to press forward with > it, since I agree that it is REALLY important that this and other other > FFI-like features work and work well. > > In general, I find the Linux vm to be too willing to crash w/o leaving a > trace, or at least a trace that I know how to find(??).
Hi Bill, I am not sure what was causing the crashes (I have seen this too, although not on the latest Pharo that I tried tonight). But I am quite sure that you should not blame the VM, and you should not blame Pharo either. In such a case, the fault lies with the person who wrote the plugin that crashed (that would be me). I expect that the unit tests ended up passing the "wrong" object as a parameter to some primitive in OSProcessPlugin, which in turn led to a crash. Most likely the symptoms (VM crash) will go away whenever we figure out the issues with OSProcess on Pharo, but only correct solution is to write the primitives with enough parameter checking that a VM crash cannot happen. If I see this problem again, I'll try running the VM under a gdb debugger to find out which primitive is causing the crash. That's probably the only way to find it, because the VM cannot prevent a sloppy plugin from doing a segfault and exiting. Dave _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
