Thursday, April 24, 2008

Stupid Bugs - Part 823

Well, I guess I never mentioned any of the previous bugs, but today I started looking at two rather vexing bugs that hit us on RHEL 5/Itanium. One of them (#2985) was rather odd since I couldn't reproduce it anywhere and the binary did valgrind clean I was running out of ideas. After building Sage 3.0 on Ubuntu LTS 6.06 I hit the same bug there, so it was even more vexing since everything worked on 64 bit Debian testing. But after looking at it over on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS there I still didn't see anything obvious that could be wrong. Switching back to my Itanium test box eventually revealed the problem. Somebody had left a 32 bit x86 binary of optimal in the spkg. Since the makefile for the Reid solver sucked we never ended up building it on a most x86 compatible Linux platforms. So it did start up on Itanium and then more or less die instantly. The bug is now fixed and is merged in 3.0.1.alpha0.

Next up: #2983 - an Itanium specific segfault in Singular. The fun never stops ;)

I have been rather quiet here, but hopefully I will be more active again in the future. Many things are swirling around in my head, but during the 3.0 release cycle I did not have the time to actually write down a long winded rant here. But I think that will change the next week.

Cheers,

Michael

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