On 2 Apr 2019, at 13:40, Guillermo Polito <guillermopolito@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all, Esteban,

In the last sprint with Pablo and Pierre we have detected several misbehaviours with files.

The issue was particular reproducible when trying to run iceberg tests: the VM kind of ran out of slots for opening files. The strangest thing is that the leaks seemed to happen when deleting directories, so we had a look at the changes done to iterate directories, get file attributes and so on.

While on the FileReference code everything seemed ok, we have observerd with `lsof` that still several directories remained open even after deleting them.

Latest VM fixes this issue but contains another one related to Metal rendering, which prevents rendering in OSX versions < than High Sierra.

Tracking the issue a bit, this seems to be a bug in the FileAttributes plugin that was fixed by this PR by alistair (https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/commit/a838346b1a67712cc28298534dafbd0c26ea34fb).

We have tested that particular commit (a838346b1a67712cc28298534dafbd0c26ea34fb) and this one contains Alistair's fixes but not yet the new rendering using Metal. We have been testing that VM since yesterday and it seems stable, what do you think about marking it stable for Pharo8

?

Regarding Pharo7, Pharo7's stable VM is the same as Pharo8's, so it contains the same issue. However, since on the image side the code does not use the problematic primitives, we do not think we need to change the VM for Pharo7 (yet). However, there is seemingly a fix for directories containing blanks, maybe Alistair can give us some input here? :)

Ideas?

Thanks,

Guille and Pablo