Follow up: Failure to build GNU Radio on various Ubuntu builds

GNU Radio
1

I managed to resolve a problem with the install.

Commands, find_usrp_devices and uhd_usrp_probe failed to get my B100 to
respond with the model and daughter board and FPGA information. Yet at
other
times it would work, albeit very briefly.

Whilst trying to keep this follow up mail brief, the problem was caused
by
the USB lead I was using. Although a new lead and just 2m in length, it
must
be unable to handle the bus communications between the USRP and my PC.
However, for the past few months it’s been fine when using my B100 on
Windows 8.1 when casually running SDR# or HDSDR.

Whilst working in Ubuntu, when I ran the lsusb command, the USRP was
listed.
This was puzzling, for me anyway, as beyond that the USRP would not
function
or rather I could not get it to intermittently communicate with my PC,
as
mentioned above.

Whilst switching back to my Windows partition, I checked the USB lead
with
known working applications in Windows 10; HDSDR and SDR#, since by this
time
I felt my USRP B100 may have been faulty. My USRP wouldn’t work in those
applications either, though it had previously worked perfectly well on
the
same now suspect USB lead. The commands, find_usrp_devices and
uhd_usrp_probe on a Windows platform (from Command line) wouldn’t work
with
the suspect faulty cable attached (the command, uhd_usrp_probe,being
particularly problematic in returning runtime errors).

Again, without going into more tests and irregular driver responses in
Windows 10, with the UHD driver throwing up errors, I changed the USB
cable
with another cable in desperation and the whole system came alive and
has
remained so over the past day or so.

I swapped the cable with a 1.5m filtered USB cable I’ve owned for years
and
this confirmed the problem. I swapped it back again, to the suspect
cable,
and the irregular functions reoccurred. However, the suspect USB lead
works
fine with any other equipment I have such as printer and an USB
expansion
port. I wasn’t using an expansion USB device when these errors were
occurring BTW, just the suspect one USB lead between the PC and the USRP
B100.

All it is left for me to do is now go back to my Ubuntu partition and
try to
reinstall GNURadio again on a fresh install of Ubuntu (as I have done so
many times this past week trying to get it to work) and hopefully get
some
more positive results.

I will start with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64 bit as that was the last known
Ubuntu
distro that worked two years ago when running many successful installs
of
GNURadio on my other PC’s and laptop. This includes successfully
installing
GNURadio on Windows 7 at the time. However, in terms of Ubuntu, I will
again
use Marcus’s excellent build-gnuradio script, as I did two years ago and
work on from there. I’m hoping Marcus’s script will fetch the required
dependencies and build to a successful outcome this time around again.

Else, if you can advise on any other approach to installing GNURadio, on
more recent Ubuntu distro’s, so that it will also reliably work with my
B100
USRP, I should be grateful again for your help. I really want to learn
and
work with GNURadio so that I can better understand its function since
with
various academic commitments I have had so little time over the past
couple
of years and more since investing in the Ettus USRP concept back in
2012.

Again, your patient help is very much appreciated.

Mark

2

I have had similar problems with cheap USB cables that work for
low-speed devices, but utterly fail for higher-speed transfers.

You might as well update to at least Ubuntu 14.04 or even 15.04, Gnu
Radio (via build-gnuradio) is known to work in that environment.

3

Hi,

as Marcus L. said, the logs are tremendously informative. A segfault in
the cc1plus executable (which is the actual C++ compiler in GCC) is
extremely seldom, and should be treated as either a bug in GCC, or a bug
in your system.
Now, I haven’t seen an Out-Of-Memory error in a while, since RAM has
become too cheap :), but I think OOM-killing wouldn’t say “Segmentation
fault”. Trying to access a larger-than 2^32 address in a 32bit system
might, though.
So either you’re running a 32 bit OS, and the compiler needs more than
2GB of RAM, or I guess you have a GCC bug at hand, or something like
defective RAM – I noticed defective RAM in my previous machine only
when I tried to work with an 8GB file in RAM, because the probability of
something going wrong scales with the amount of RAM your system actually
uses.

Best regards,
Marcus

4

On 08/20/2015 03:13 PM, Mark wrote:

Hmmm, if you have 4GB of RAM, that should be plenty. Is this a physical
machine, or a VM?

The only time I’ve seen GCC segfault is due to out-of-memory. But my
experience is that 4GB of physical RAM is enough–I’ve rebuilt GR and
UHD on
my Fedora-20 machine with only 4GB of memory on it several times in
the last couple of weeks without issue.

What does:

dpkg-query -l gcc

Return?

5

On 08/20/2015 09:33 AM, Mark wrote:

Here is another error.

The errors are many and I could keep posting variations of these to you and I’m
not sure what purpose they would serve in finding a solution.

Anyway, I will post this error and await your advice before trying again. The
next attempt will be around the 30th attempt to get GNURadio to install
successfully.
Again, when the compiler segfaults, that’s something that’s entirely
outside the scope of what build-gnuradio can cope with, and isn’t an
issue with
Gnu Radio, per se. This usually happens due, as I said in my
few-minutes-ago response, to insufficient system RAM.

This is the first time I’ve seen logs from you that contain obvious
compiler internal errors, which is why it wasn’t obvious, before,
exactly what
was going on. So, getting these detailed logs is tremendously useful
in figuring out what is going on.

6

On 08/20/2015 04:01 PM, Mark wrote:

To: [email protected], “[email protected]”
[email protected]

When you do one of these builds, and it fails due to segfault, is there
anything suggestive showing up in ‘dmesg’ ??

This just looks really weird. There are hundreds of people around the
world who have built GR from source on Ubuntu 14.04 without issue.

Are all you packages up-to-date after you did the install?

7

On 08/20/2015 06:13 AM, Mark wrote:

Please submit a full bug report,

If you can continue to advise I should be grateful.

Mark
This is almost certainly a known problem in the compiler when it runs
out of memory–how much memory do you have on your machine?

This error is coming from the compiler, so there’s nothing that
build-gnuradio can do about it, however, you can:

(1) Install more RAM
(2) Add a secondary swap file. See, for example: