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Re: SIGTRAP crash with ngspice

 

If needed be that it won't be merged in kicad, we could patch it in with
the build scripts for fedora until the libngspice package is updated and
this should allow us to enable ngspice on the fedora copr builds.

On Mon, 14 Jan 2019 at 16:30, Steven A. Falco <stevenfalco@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I wanted to close the loop on the SIGTRAP crash that I reported a few days
> ago.
>
> The issue is probably unique to Fedora, and stems from a huge quantity of
> "percent complete" messages that the ngspice library passes back to KiCad.
> I'm not kidding when I say huge - it amounts to over 1 megabyte of text,
> including many backspace characters.  When I try to select the text, it
> probably blows up the clipboard and causes the crash.
>
> The ideal fix will be to have the Fedora ngspice maintainer remove a flag,
> which in turn will disable the "percent complete" messages.
>
> In the interim, I have a patch that filters out any line containing a
> string of backspaces.  I don't know if there is any interest in applying
> this patch to the official KiCad sources, but I've attached it here in case
> there is interest.  I see it as defensive programming. :-)
>
> I'll wait a bit to see what happens with the ngspice library.  If it looks
> like there will be a substantial delay in having the flag removed, I can
> always apply my patch and push that as the next official Fedora build.
>
>         Steve
>
> On 1/11/19 2:25 PM, Steven A. Falco wrote:
> > On 1/11/19 1:51 PM, Steven A. Falco wrote:
> >> On 1/11/19 1:21 PM, Seth Hillbrand wrote:
> >>> Am 2019-01-11 12:18, schrieb Steven A. Falco:
> >>>> I tried another ngspice experiment.  I ran a simulation, and it
> >>>> worked, albeit with the data size warning I asked about earlier.  So
> >>>> far so good.
> >>>
> >>> That warning was saying that it ran out of memory and had overwritten
> unplanned space.  I would expect a crash after that.  I'm not sure that
> KiCad can trap that kind of error as it occurred inside the library.
> >>
> >> Ok, but I'm concerned about the bug reports I'll get if I were to
> enable ngspice and push the build to the Fedora community.
> >>
> >> I'll wait to see if the forum has any thoughts on the warning.  I'll
> only enable ngspice in the official Fedora builds if I can get to where the
> examples run cleanly.
> >
> > I saved the netlist from the simple example I've been running:
> >
> > .title KiCad schematic
> > V101 in 0 PULSE (0 5 1u 1u 1u 1 1)
> > C101 Net-_C101-Pad1_ 0 1u
> > C102 out 0 100n
> > R101 Net-_C101-Pad1_ in 10k
> > R102 out Net-_C101-Pad1_ 1k
> > .save @v101[i]
> > .save @c101[i]
> > .save @c102[i]
> > .save @r101[i]
> > .save @r102[i]
> > .save V(0)
> > .save V(GND)
> > .save V(Net-_C101-Pad1_)
> > .save V(in)
> > .save V(out)
> > .tran 1u 100m
> > .end
> >
> > When I run this circuit in stand-alone ngspice, it does a lot of
> overprinting, apparently to indicate the run-time of the job.  Here is a
> small example of the character stream, where there are tons of backspaces
> as part of the overprinting:
> >
> > saf$ od -c foo
> > 0000000   %   0   .   0   0  \b  \b  \b  \b  \b   %   0   .   0   0  \b
> > 0000020  \b  \b  \b  \b   %   0   .   0   0  \b  \b  \b  \b  \b   %   0
> > 0000040   .   0   0  \b  \b  \b  \n
> > 0000047
> >
> > The stand-alone captured output from this simple circuit is around 1
> Mbyte!  I'm guessing that this huge amount of data is blowing up the window
> and showing all of the strange characters.
> >
> > I'm not sure of the division of labor here.  Is that something that a
> KiCad developer should address, or is it a library issue?  Hopefully there
> is a flag that can be passed to the library to suppress the overprinted
> text.
> >
> >       Steve
> >
>
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