Squeak lockup

Andreas Raab Andreas.Raab at gmx.de
Fri May 31 19:28:22 UTC 2002


Bill,

> I have an intermittent (but persistent) problem with a lockup on 
> Win95 in a MIDI app; that can take seconds or hours to show up, 
> but, the VM seems to keep running, the Morphic UI freezes.  I'm 
> slowly shifting hardware around in hopes of trying the same thing 
> on another computer and OS without "destroying" the machine with 
> the reproduceable problem.
> 
> The short version is that I'm very interested in seeing how one 
> debugs such things in Squeak. 

It is very hard to do this. Partly because you need low-level VM tools
to look into some of these issues. In particular if they only happen on
some machines it means that some assertion of the VM about its hosting
platform is wrong. And that means you need to go into it very low-level.
There are some features that might help (I added for instance the
ability to list all socket state in order to find some of the socket
related problems) but this doesn't replace a debugger. Since all of the
VM maintainers test quite heavily across all (available) flavours of
OSes it also means that the code "ought to work" as it is.

> To date, I've gotten crash dumps 
> >from it by enabling 3D hardware acceleration on a particular 
> machine;

That machine wouldn't use a graphics card which is based on a RIVA TNT
chip on Win98, would it?! I just got a totally weird crash report from
such a configuration but since I don't have access to it it's almost
impossible to do remote debugging.

Cheers,
  - Andreas




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