Tag - crash

How to fix GNAT symbolic traceback crash on Ubuntu

By Stephane Carrez

When you use the GNAT symbolic traceback feature with gcc 4.4 on Ubuntu 10.04, a segmentation fault occurs. This article explains why and proposes a workaround until the problem is fixed in the distribution.

Symbolic Traceback

The GNU Ada Compiler provides a support package to dump the exception traceback with symbols.

with Ada.Exceptions;
  use Ada.Exceptions;
with GNAT.Traceback.Symbolic;
  use GNAT.Traceback.Symbolic;
with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
...
exception
  when E : others =>
    Put_Line ("Exception: " & Exception_Name (E));
    Put_Line (Symbolic_Traceback (E));

GNAT Symbolic Traceback crash

On Ubuntu 10.04 and probably on other Debian distributions, the symbolic traceback crashes in convert_addresses:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0xb7ab20a6 in convert_addresses () from /usr/lib/libgnat-4.4.so.1
(gdb) where
#0  0xb7ab20a6 in convert_addresses () from /usr/lib/libgnat-4.4.so.1
#1  0xb7ab1f2c in gnat__traceback__symbolic__symbolic_traceback () from /usr/lib/libgnat-4.4.so.1
#2  0xb7ab2054 in gnat__traceback__symbolic__symbolic_traceback__2 () from /usr/lib/libgnat-4.4.so.1

The problem is caused by a patch that was applied on GCC 4.4 sources and which introduces a bug in convert_addresses function. Basically, the function is missing a filename argument which causes other arguments to be incorrect.

void convert_addresses (const char* filename,
         void* addrs[], int n_addr,
         char* buf, int*  len)

Since convert_addresses is provided by the libgnat-4.4.so dynamic library, we can easily replace this function by linking our program with the correct implementation. Get the convert_addresses.c, compile it and add it when you link your program:

$ gcc -c convert_addresses.c
$ gnatmake -Pproject -largs convert_addresses.o
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Restoring a complete system after a hard disk failure: bacula to the rescue!!!

By Stephane Carrez

Last day the main disk of by computer stopped to work. My Western Digital 150Gb raptor hard disk was no longer recognized by the system: it was simply dead after one year of work. The 10000 rpm di

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