Porting Unix ada app to Linux: Seg fault before program begins

Question

I am an intern who was offered the task of porting a test application from Solaris to Red Hat. The application is written in Ada. It works just fine on the Unix side. I compiled it on the linux side, but now it is giving me a seg fault. I ran the debugger to see where the fault was and got this:

Warning: In non-Ada task, selecting an Ada task. => runtime tasking structures have not yet been initialized. <non-Ada task> with thread id 0b7fe46c0 process received signal "Segmentation fault" [11] task #1 stopped in _dl_allocate_tls at 0870b71b: mov edx, [edi] ;edx := [edi]

This seg fault happens before any calls are made or anything is initialized. I have been told that 'tasks' in ada get started before the rest of the program, and the problem could be with a task that is running.

But here is the kicker. This program just generates some code for another program to use. The OTHER program, when compiled under linux gives me the same kind of seg fault with the same kind of error message. This leads me to believe there might be some little tweak I can use to fix all of this, but I just don't have enough knowledge about Unix, Linux, and Ada to figure this one out all by myself.

You can also ask this question on groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada — mamboking
When a problem is occurring before hitting the first line of the main program, you can often locate the problem area by (assuming you're using GNAT) starting the application in the debugger, immediately setting a breakpoint on the function adainit (b adainit), then (r)unning it. "adainit" is the compiler-generated application initializing function--which just calls a lot of other functions--so you can step through it to determine exactly what initializing entity is triggering the problem. (Of course make sure your sources were compiled with the debug option: -g) — Marc C

T.E.D. T.E.D. · Accepted Answer · 2009-07-07T14:19:37

This is a total shot in the dark, but you can have tasks blow up like this at startup if they are trying to allocate too much local memory on the stack. Your main program can safely use the system stack, but tasks have to have their stack allocated at startup from dynamic memory, so typcially your runtime has a default stack size for tasks. If your task tries to allocate a large array, it can easily blow past that limit. I've had it happen to me before.

There are multiple ways to fix this. One way is to move all your task-local data into package global areas. Another is to dynamically allocate it all.

If you can figure out how much memory would be enough, you have a couple more options. You can make the task a task type, and then use a

for My_Task_Type_Name'Storage_Size use Some_Huge_Number;

statement. You can also use a "pragma Storage_Size(My_Task_Type_Name)", but I think the "for" statement is preferred.

Lastly, with Gnat you can also change the default task stack size with the -d flag to gnatbind.

Porting Unix ada app to Linux: Seg fault before program begins

3 Answers