2018-03-24 11:11 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano estebanlm@gmail.com:
hi,
On 24 Mar 2018, at 09:50, Cyril Ferlicot D. cyril.ferlicot@gmail.com
wrote:
Le 23/03/2018 à 21:52, Eliot Miranda a écrit :
Hi Damien,
Indeed the image is corrupt at start-up. See below.
Right. This VM is prior to the bug fixes in VMMaker.oscog-eem.2320:
Spur: Fix a bad bug in SpurPlnningCompactor. unmarkObjectsFromFirstFreeObject, used when the compactor requires
more
than one pass due to insufficient savedFirstFieldsSpace, expects the corpse of a moved object to be unmarked, but copyAndUnmarkObject:to:bytes:firstField: only unmarked the target. Unmarking the corpse before the copy unmarks both. This fixes a crash with ReleaseBuilder class>>saveAsNewRelease when non-use of cacheDuring: creates lots of files, enough to push the system into the multi-pass
regime.
Pharo urgently needs to upgrade the VM 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.
Hi Eliot,
I think that there is a lot of people who would like to get a newer stable vm for Pharo 6.1 and 7. The problem is that it is hard to know which VM are stable enough to be promoted as stable.
Some weeks ago Esteban tried to promote a VM as stable and he had to revert it the same day because a regression occurred in the VM.
If you're able to tell us which vms are stable in those present at http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur32/ and http://files.pharo.org/vm/pharo-spur64/ it would be a great help.
Even better would be for the pharo community to have a way to know which vms are stable or not without having to ask you.
there is no “stable” branch in Cog, and that’s a problem. “released” versions (the version you can find as stable) are not working for Pharo :(
I tried to promote versions from end feb and that crashed.
next week I will try again, maybe now they are stable enough… one thing is true: the versions that we consider stable (from oct/17) present problems that are already solved on latest.
Esteban
Have a nice day.
-- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
-- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr
Hi, Several problems are mixed here, let's try and decouple: - 1) there are ongoing development in the core of VM that may introduce some instability - 2) there are ongoing development in some plugins also - 3) there are infrastructure problems preventing to produce artifacts whatever the intrinsic stability of the VM
For 1) development happens in VMMaker, and we have to be relying on experts. Today that is Eliot and Clement. We all want 64bits VM, improved GC, improved become:, write barrier, ephemerons, threaded FFI calls and adaptive optimization. Pharo is relying on these progress, they are vital. IMO, we are reaching a good level of confidence, and I hope to see some VMMaker version blessed as stable pretty soon.
Instead of whining, the best we can do for reaching this state is help them by providing accurate bug reports and even better reproducible cases. Thanks to all who are working in this direction.
For 2) we had a few problems, but again this is for improving important features (SSL...) Much of the development happens in feature branches already. But since we are targetting so many platforms, and don't have automated tests that scale yet, we still need beta testers. We can discuss about the introduction of such beta features wrt release cycles, that will be a good thing. Ideally we should tend toward continuous integration and have very short cycles, but we're not yet there.
For 3) we had a lot of problems, like staled links, invalid credentials, evolution of the version of tools at automated build site, etc...
If we don't build the artifacts, then we can't even have a chance to test the stability of 1) and 2) We have to understand that 3) is absolutely vital.
May I remind that for a very long period last year, the build were broken due to lack of work at Pharo side. Fortunately, this has changed in 2018. Fabio has been working REALLY hard to improve 3), and without the help of Esteban,I don't think he could have reached the holy green build status. We will never thank them enough for that. This also shows that cooperation may pay.
But this is still very fragile. If we want to make progress, we should ask why it is so. We could analyze the regressions, and decide if the complexity is sustainable, or eventually drop some drag. We are chasing many hares by building the VM for Newspeak/Pharo/Squeak i386/x86_64/ARM Spur/Stack/V3 Sista/lowcode linux/Macosx/Windows ... If it happens that a fix vital for Pharo/Squeak does break Newspeak tests, then it slows down the progress... Maybe we would want to decouple a bit more the problems there too (they may come from some image side weakness).
Last two years I've also observed some work exclusively done in the Pharo fork of the opensmalltalk VM. This was counter productive. Work must be produced upstream, or it's wasted. I once thought that the Pharo fork could be the place for the pharo team to manage official stable versions. But I agree that this is too much duplicated work and would be very happy to see the work happen upstream too.
If you have constructive ideas that will help decoupling all these problems, we are all ear.
PS: i did not post this answer for avoiding sterile discussion, but since Phil asked...