[Lazarus] Why does linux+fpc2.2.4+modern lazarus hang? [was: FindInvalidUTF8Character hanging linux hard?]

[Luca Olivetti]

En/na Bernd Mueller ha escrit:

> with "linux hang hard" you mean the machine is completely frozen?

Yes. I even left it on a text console to see if there was an Oops or 
something, but it just froze.

> Does 
> not react on ping and so on?

Nothing, not even to the magic sysreq key.

> Could it be a hardware problem?

I doubt it: it happens on four machines (five if counting my test rig). 
They're all the same and the problem manifests in all of them since I 
installed the new version of the program.
Oh, and I tested on a different machine too (though it's even more 
underpowered than the epia, but I have that class of machine working 
reliably with a similar, if not quite the same, kind of program, and 
with gtk2 and lazarus from around 1 year ago).

> Maybe the 
> BIOS settings are to "aggressive".

I tried many different bios settings. Knowing that there's a problem 
with dma on this board, I even updated the bios. Alas, it made no 
difference (not that I was expecting one: this system doesn't use 
neither the disk nor the network).

> Maybe there is a hardware memory 
> problem, which is only popping up when you use the modern (perhaps more 
> memory consuming) fpc/lazarus/gtk environment.

Memory and cpu consumption is just about the same.
I used memtest to check for memory errors.
What's more important, is that the memory usage (VSZ/RSS as reported by 
ps) of the program is constant once it has reached a plateau value, so 
apparently it shouldn't be allocating more memory.
Note that the freeze happens at a random time: it could be 10 minutes, 
it could be a week (hence, I'm not sure that reverting the development 
environment actually cured the issue, I need to leave it running for at 
least a couple of week).
It always seems to happen doing the same thing though: (i.e., I display 
various fields on the screen, when reading new data I display dashes in 
the fields and "Reading" at the bottom of the page, and the crash always 
happens at that time).


Unfortunately I think I covered all my bases :-(

Bye
-- 
Luca Olivetti
Wetron Automatización S.A. http://www.wetron.es/
Tel. +34 93 5883004 (Ext.133)  Fax +34 93 5883007