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

[Esteban Lorenzano]

Hi,

> On 31 Mar 2018, at 11:45, Alistair Grant <akgrant0710 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

I will try to promote then the one of 15 march. We’ll see next week. 
but then, this is part of my observation: We cannot know which VMs are stable, and that’s because the *process* to make them stable is very “human dependent”: We consider a version stable when it builds on CI and Eliot says is stable. But since Eliot does not use Pharo (not a critic, a reality), that may be not true for Pharo. And that’s actually what happens, Pharo crashes. 
I tried to avoid a bit this problem with our fork and nightly builds that runs the pharo tests (to knew about problems as early as possible). But to be honest I didn’t have the time (and the will) to work on it recently, then pharo fork is in practice stalled. I will revive that eventually… but just when I find the time and the spirit to do it.
> 
>> 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.

latest VM copied into files.pharo.org <http://files.pharo.org/> is 16/03. 
we need to see what’s happening there.

> -- 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.

all VMs are available to test.
just… not available *directly* to general users. 
now… I could have a 70rc link in vm subdir. But since I cannot know which VM is RC I find it pointless at this moment.

cheers, 
Esteban


> 
> Cheers,
> Alistair

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