-----Original Message----- From: Schwab,Wilhelm K Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 4:12 PM To: johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com Subject: RE: [Pharo-project] vm on ubuntu John, My ageing image that did the mouse wheel crash is as follows: SmalltalkImage current getSystemAttribute: 1004 'Pharo0.1 of 16 May 2008 [latest update: #10074]' The system dictionary/error handling failure was the RC1 web image. Both quit using the following vm: SmalltalkImage current getSystemAttribute: 1006 'Unix built on Feb 5 2009 19:38:30 Compiler: 4.1.2 (Gentoo 4.1.2 p1.3)' I had bad experiences with newer images, but the old image has been very stable. One could argue that both have been flaky since I upgraded to 9.10. My laptop chipset seems to like the new kernel, especially in terms of reliable access to the full native resolution, and sound works where it did not on 9.04. My desktop did not do so well. The upgrade was quite slow. It soon presented me with a black screen. With no response, I finally killed the power, which apparently corrupted the swap partition. I finally got it back by removing and re-creating the swap partition, followed by a certain amount of forced checking that might or might not have fixed something. Suspecting power management, I disabled putting the display to sleep, and have not had a problem since. The package manager crashed once on my laptop, so I do not rule out problems with the Koala. Bill ________________________________________ From: John M McIntosh [johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 2:21 PM To: Schwab,Wilhelm K Cc: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] vm on ubuntu Well beyond the simple memory access violation (seg fault) type of failure then. (a) if you have configured your vm to use a limited amount of memory and you enter a recursive loop the VM likely will thrash thru the available memory in a small number of milliseconds on a fast machine then exit(). I believe by default it's 1GB, but if there is no paging involved to find 1GB of ram it can happen quite quickly. (b) Older unix/linux vm are susceptible to crashing if they expand image memory over the 2GB address boundary. I can't say exactly what version that would be, but if you supply the build information for your VM SmalltalkImage current getSystemAttribute: 1004 and SmalltalkImage current getSystemAttribute: 1006 That might give a clue to if the fixes for the problem are in the VM you are using. On 2009-11-03, at 11:08 AM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
John,
I would be happy to give a reproducible example, but one eludes me at present. To add to the fun, I have now seen the image quit on a second Linux box; this time, my laptop. I am fairly certain that it crashed over a mouse wheel event.
Both machines are running Ubuntu 9.10, which might be the trigger of my new-found hassles.
Bill
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