[Vm-dev] Re: [Pharo-project] UUID and Cog?

[David T. Lewis]

Moving to vm-dev list for follow up related to the UUIDPlugin.

On Wed, Oct 06, 2010 at 04:37:00AM +0200, Levente Uzonyi wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Oct 2010, David T. Lewis wrote:

<unrelated discussion of Cog configurations snipped>

> >As far as I know, there have been no reports of libuuid failures on
> >the Unix VMs since Ian changed to using an internal UUIDPlugin, so
> >this is an easy fix if it works for Cog also.
> 
> If libuuid is not available, the internally built UUIDPlugin crashes the 
> VM.
> 
> Levente

Levente, thanks for identifying this. I was able to reproduce this on my
system by removing the libuuid libraries, after which a VM with internal
UUIDPlugin refuses to load:

/usr/local/lib/squeak/4.3.4-2316/squeakvm: error while loading shared libraries: libuuid.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I reopened the issue on Mantis http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7358
with the following explanation:

> Changing status from resolved back to acknowledged. Levente Uzonyi
> reports that the plugin, if built internally, will crash the VM if
> the target system does not have libuuid installed.
> 
> http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/2010-October/033760.html [^]
> 
> I reproduced this by removing the libuuid libraries from my Linux system.
> The result is that the VM fails to load due to the missing library. It
> never reaches main(), so this is not something that can be addressed in
> the code. Presumably a static linked VM would work, but this would
> probably lead to problems elsewhere.
> 
> Summary: Building UUIDPlugin internally is a workaround for the libuuid
> bug that is present on some systems, but it results in an unusable VM for
> people who do not have the uuid library installed with their OS.

Levente, can you say anything about what OS platforms would not have
libuuid installed? I am guessing that it is a scenario involving a 64-bit
OS for which some of the 32-bit runtime libraries were not installed, but
if you can clarify this it would be helpful.

Thanks!

Dave