[Vm-dev] Image crashing on startup, apparently during GC

[Alistair Grant]

On 23 March 2018 at 21:52, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM

I couldn't agree more, and I know Esteban wants to release a new VM.
I did quite a bit of testing on a VM from 15 March that I thought
would make a good candidate before realising that the Mac VMs aren't
available.

> to one more up to date than 2017 08 27 (in fact more up-to-date than opensmalltalk/vm commit 0fe1e1ea108e53501a0e728736048062c83a66ce, Fri Jan 19 13:17:57 2018 -0800).  The bug that VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320 fixes can result in image corruption in large images, and can occur (as it has here) at start-up, causing one's work to be irretrievably lost.

Most, if not all, the VMs between 1 Jan and 15 Mar have bugs that are
triggered either by the automated test suite or the bootstrap process.


The blocks I can see at the moment are:

- Multiple builds have failed with an internal compiler error on the
sista builds.
-- The earliest occurrence I could find was commit 1f0a7da, but it may
have been earlier.
- Even if the Mac builds show success in travis, they aren't making it
on to files.pharo.org.
-- I haven't ever worked with this code.

Not directly related, but:
- Bintray hasn't been updated since 8 March 2018.


I think it could also be useful for files.pharo.org to have release
candidate links available, which would help people to focus testing on
a particular VM.  They would need to be manually maintained, but I
think the benefits would be worthwhile.

Cheers,
Alistair