LabView 7.1 segfault in Fedora Core 2

[Bill_Gabella]

LabView 7.1 crashes when I try to run it under Fedora Core 2 / Linux. This looks like a library incompatibility, perhaps in the threading (just a guess, /lib/tls libs?). LV 7.1 ran fine until I performed some software updates. Since I do not know exactly when LV broke, I cannot say which upgrades might have broken it.

Sympton is the LV splash screen comes up and then the program segfaults...with an illegal memory access.

There is a link to the LabVIEW generated error log and to a strace of the program start. Seems hungup in the gettimeofday() routine.

http://arago.fel.vanderbilt.edu:8200/Members/gabella/docs/LV_err_summary/

Thanks, bill e. gabella (b.gabella@vanderbilt.edu)

[KileenC]

Hi Bill,

Mandrake and Fedora Core 2 (FC2) use a new directory indexing feature on their filesystems, which causes "." and ".." to not always be first in the file list. LabVIEW currently relies on this behavior (you can see this by doing ls -af in a directory). Fortunately, you can turn the feature off.

On all of your ext3 partitions, you'll want to run (as root):

tune2fs -O ^dir_index /dev/yourpartition

You can find out the partition(s) by running "mount". Here is what this might look like:

dduffey$ mount
/dev/hdb2 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts
(rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt
_misc type
binfmt_misc (rw)

in which case I did:

tune2fs -O ^dir_index /dev/hdb2

(my only ext3 partition)

You should immediatly be able to use LabVIEW. This process changes a flag on the filesystem, and should work across reboots (unless Mandrake/RedHat resets the dir_index in their startup scripts, highly unlikely).

Good luck!

Kileen C.
NI

[Bill_Gabella]

Tried this and double checked using both "ls -f" and "dumpe2fs -h /dev/hdaXXX" to make sure the dir_index is turned off. It is, though on boot it resets it to on. I even went to the length of reinstalling labview with dir_index off. Still labview does not get past the splash screen. I do not seem to be alone in this. I came across some other postings with the same problem.

The other posting mentioned a possible buggered LabVIEW.ini file, but I seem not to be getting far enough along to generate one.

Thanks for any help.

[Bill_Gabella]

Did some more checking. Running Fedora core 2, same utilities and libraries, LabVIEW works fine with kernel 2.6.7-1.494.2.2 and it bombs after the splash screen in kernel 2.6.8-1.521 . I have the 'straces' from both and will compare them.

[KileenC]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the update. Notes on our in-house testing of this Linux issue only indicate that it was with a Linux 2.6 kernal. I will check further to determine the exact kernel version and it may be that 2.6.8-1.521 has different behavior than the 2.6.? kernel version we tested.

[Bill_Gabella]

Just installed Fedora Core 3 (now called Fedora Linux 3) and with its kernel LabView 7.1 runs fine. The kernel is...
Linux a235153.n1.vanderbilt.edu 2.6.9-1.667 #1 Tue Nov 2 14:41:25 EST 2004 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

I would bet that installing this kernel in any Linux would get LabView running again. For future stability it would be nice to know what went wrong in these kernels.

[KileenC]

Good to know. Thanks for the update! I'll pass on the information to R&D to investigate. I'm wondering about the kernels too.

Thanks again.