[Haskell-cafe] Trying to figure out a segfault caused by haskeline.

[Jason Dagit]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 7:37 PM, ryan winkelmaier <syfran92 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hey everyone,
>
> I'm looking for help with a seg fault that takes out both my ghci and darcs
> as well as anything that uses haskeline. A bug on the haskeline trac hasn't
> gotten any response so I figured I might as well figure this out myself and
> get ghci up and running again.
>
> Using the test program below I get the same segmentation fault, so I run it
> using gdb and get the following,
>
> Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
> 0x000000000053fdce in base_ForeignziCziString_zdwa_info ()
>
> My knowledge of this is very limited from here on out so here is what I was
> able to get together.
>
> On the 20th call of base_ForeignziCziString_zdwa_info
> r14 is 0 so
>
> 0x000000000053fdce <+22>:    movsbq (%r14),%rax
>
> produces the segfault.
> >From what I understand this is happening in the Foreign.C.String module
> but thats as much as I know.
> Anyone have advice on where to go next?
>

You can use gdb to get a stack trace.  It's a stack trace in a mixture of
FFI, the GHC RTS, and your compiled haskell but it can still help you figure
out where it happened.

It's something like:
gdb --args testprog <any flags you need>
> run
# Wait for the segfault
> where

The 'where' should give you a C stack trace.

Once you know the stack trace, you can work backwards from there.  You might
also try using the ghci debugger to see if you can step through the
evaluation and see which line you're on in Haskell land when the segfault is
delivered.  You could also try strace/dtruss to figure if there are system
calls involved.

The last time I had a problem like this, a foreign pointer was freeing
memory allocated in the Haskell heap while C code was trying to dereference
the pointer.  It seems that in 6.10.2 there was a positive change that made
finalizers run during garbage collection.  The library I was using seemed to
have issues with that change to the RTS.  Fixing the finalizers to run later
seemed to fix it.

I hope that helps,
Jason
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