Segmentation fault (core dump) -- help needed

GNU Radio
1

Hi all,

I’m a newbie in gnu software radio (and in python, and in linux) and got
stuck on this segmentation fault issue.
I am trying to setup GNU software radio on a machine (HP workstation
xw8600 with dual intel Xeon processor).
I installed Fedora Core 14 and installed all needed dependencies using
YUM
as shown below.

yum groupinstall “Engineering and Scientific” “Development Tools”
yum install fftw-devel cppunit-devel wxPython-devel libusb-devel guile
boost-devel alsa-lib-devel numpy gsl-devel python-devel pygsl
python-cheetah python-lxml
yum install sdcc

yum install gnuradio
yum install gnuradio-examples
yum install usrp

The installation went ok without any issue.
However, when I tried dial tone example at
“/usr/share/gnuradio/examples/audio/dial_tone.py”, it said nothing else
but “segmentation fault(core dump)”, and nothing happened. I tried other
examples, but this segmentation fault error came up all the time. I
found
a couple of simple gnu radio examples from google and tried, but the
same
thing happened. I inserted print statement in the code to see where it
failed and it failed in “my_top_block().run()” function.

I want to know why this problem occurs and how to solve it. Can anyone
help me out? Any idea/suggestion will be welcomed.
I’m still studying GNU software radio blocks, but is there any way to
narrow down which block (or which function) cause this segmentation
fault?

Thanks!

Thomas

2

On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 07:42:25AM -0500, Thomas H Kim wrote:

yum install gnuradio-examples
yum install usrp

Hi Thomas,

did you install gnuradio from the Fedora repositories? Which version do
you have?
Just a couple of threads ago someone else had problems with Fedora
packages; they are not up to date.
Try grabbing a current version from the web site and build it yourself;
it’s not that hard.

I’m still studying GNU software radio blocks, but is there any way to narrow
down which block (or which function) cause this segmentation fault?

Even in an old version, this should not happen. However, if you do have
an old version, I recommend upgrading to at least 3.3.0 and trying
again. Once it works, you’ll simply have much more fun (read:
functionality) with a newer GNU Radio.

If you do want to debug you installation, a nice place to start might be
by starting the Python command line and plugging together tiny flow
graphs by hand, to see wether or not they crash.

Cheers
MB

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Communications Engineering Lab (CEL)

Dipl.-Ing. Martin B.
Research Associate

Kaiserstraße 12
Building 05.01
76131 Karlsruhe

Phone: +49 721 608-3790
Fax: +49 721 608-6071
www.cel.kit.edu

KIT – University of the State of Baden-Württemberg and
National Laboratory of the Helmholtz Association

3

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 7:59 AM, Martin B. [email protected]
wrote:

Even in an old version, this should not happen. However, if you do have
an old version, I recommend upgrading to at least 3.3.0 and trying
again. Once it works, you’ll simply have much more fun (read:
functionality) with a newer GNU Radio.

Hi Thomas-

Welcome to linux…it’s often a jungle of confusion and strange syntax
:slight_smile:
I think what Martin is suggesting (correct me if I’m wrong) is something
along the lines of the following:

remove the gnuradio stuff that you got via yum (as that comes from a
source
that is sometimes out-of-date vs what’s on the gnuradio web site):

yum remove gnuradio
yum remove gnuradio-examples
yum remove usrp

Then go to Index of /releases/gnuradio/ and download
gnuradio-3.3.0.tar.gz
Unzip that using the tar command (I believe the syntax is something like
“tar -xvf gnuradio-3.3.0.tar.gz”)
cd into the resulting directory, then run:

./configure
make
make check
sudo make install (if you haven’t used sudo before, check this out:
Personal Fedora 9 Installation Guide )

If any of those steps give errors, report back what they say.

-Steven

PS: If it is usually the case that package managers contain obsolete
versions of gnuradio, maybe we should put some more obvious warnings in
the
install guides against using them?

4

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Thomas H Kim [email protected]
wrote:

  1. Operator error on gnu radio installation procedure (likely…since I am
    not really Linux guy)

Thank you for your help!

Thomas

Hi Thomas-

(Don’t forget to send replies to the mailing list, so we all get the
benefit
of the troubleshooting process)

Just so I understand the sequence of events: under FC14 i386, with
gnuradio
installed via yum, you got the segmentation faults. Then, you installed
FC13
x86_64 on the same machine, without changing the gnuradio installation,
and
the segfaults were gone? Or did you also reinstall gnuradio?

Either way, glad it is working now!

-Steven

5

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 12:13 PM, Steven C. [email protected]
wrote:

  1. Using FC14 (I don’t know think so, but it is possible?)

-Steven
Thomas,
Thanks. If there is any way you know of to reproduce the problem, I’d
be very interested in hearing it. If there is a problem with Fedora
14, then I’d like to know where and hopefully fix it.

It shouldn’t be a problem with 32 vs. 64-bit and I know people run GNU
Radio on Opterons and on Fedora 13. So it sounds right now like Fedora
14 is the variable. Anyone else used Fedora 14 yet?

Tom

6

Thank you all for your help.

Since I am new in Linux and GNU software Radio, I wanted to start from
known good configuration people use, so I wiped out FC14 and installed
FC13. After the fresh installation, it started working (I was able to
hear
tones from my PC’s speaker when I ran noise, dial_done examples under
GNU
radio folder).
The FC14 I installed was for 32 bit architecture, and FC13 I installed
today was for 64bit architecture.
Initially I thought it could be one of the three reasons which caused
the
segmentation fault:

  1. Using FC14
  2. Using x86_64 instead of i386
  3. Operator error on gnu radio istallation procedure (likely…since I
    am
    not really Linux guy)

I still don’t know exactly why it happen, but after talking to several
ppl
I think #3 was most likely the reason. It’s too late to go back to my
old
config(I wish I could), but I wonder if I setup PYTHONPATH correctly or
not. I searched for the python site-packages file and setup the path to
the file. I realized that there were multiple site-packages files in
this
installation. I will try to figure out if the other site-packages file
in
other than …/lib/python2.x/ cause this problem when I get some time.
If I did that step correctly, then I need to install FC14 i386 on my
workstation and see if I can reproduce it.

Again, thank you for your help.

Thomas

From: Tom R. [email protected]
To: Steven C. [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Date: 11/08/2010 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] segmentation fault (core dump) –
help needed
Sent by: discuss-gnuradio-bounces+thomas.h.kim=removed_email_address@domain.invalid

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 12:13 PM, Steven C. [email protected]
wrote:

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Thomas H Kim [email protected]
wrote:

Steven,

Thank you very much for your email.
I installed Fedora Core13 x86_64, instead of i386, which I installed
on
last Friday and it works now. But, I don’t understand because i386
should
work on 64bit machine (that was what I’ve thought so far… what do you
think?)
I guess the problem could be

  1. Using FC14 (I don’t know think so, but it is possible?)
  2. Using x86_64 instead of i386
  3. Operator error on gnu radio installation procedure (likely…since I
    am
    not really Linux guy)

Thank you for your help!

Thomas

Hi Thomas-

(Don’t forget to send replies to the mailing list, so we all get the
benefit
of the troubleshooting process)

Just so I understand the sequence of events: under FC14 i386, with
gnuradio
installed via yum, you got the segmentation faults. Then, you installed
FC13
x86_64 on the same machine, without changing the gnuradio installation,
and
the segfaults were gone? Or did you also reinstall gnuradio?

Either way, glad it is working now!

-Steven

Thomas,
Thanks. If there is any way you know of to reproduce the problem, I’d
be very interested in hearing it. If there is a problem with Fedora
14, then I’d like to know where and hopefully fix it.

It shouldn’t be a problem with 32 vs. 64-bit and I know people run GNU
Radio on Opterons and on Fedora 13. So it sounds right now like Fedora
14 is the variable. Anyone else used Fedora 14 yet?

Tom