BOINC, Einstein and the weird SIGFPE.

Modi
Modi
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Topic 193400

Hello everyone!

As you can see here Einstein has quite some problem on both of my PCs.

Most of the Workunits quit with Signal 8 (meaning SIGFPE.)

I was not able to really track down what happens, but it happens for some time now...

I even changed to the latest BOINC version without any success. :(

I'm using Linux and heard, that your Linux client often has some problems, so... I guess this is a bug that should be fixed or something like this.

Anyways, the problem is that I'm doing work for Einstein for MONTH now with just a few valid WUs and that is driving me nuts... it's just wasted CPU power, as well as for you, as for "me". :(

So do you have any clue how that happens/how it could be fixed?

-Ionic

Desti
Desti
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BOINC, Einstein and the weird SIGFPE.

What distribution do you use? I'm sure this is not an Einstein bug, looks more your configuration or hardware is broken.

Modi
Modi
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I'm using Gentoo GNU/Linux,

I'm using Gentoo GNU/Linux, but I don't think that my hardware or configuration is broken because Einstein is the only program that has such problems.
Even SETI is working really fine...

I've run memtest86+ for almost 48 hours when I got the PC - with any bad results.

Neither do I "rice", my CFLAGS were -O2 -march=pentium3 -mtune=pentium3 -mcpu=pentium3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer on one PC and -O2 -march=pentium-m -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer on the other one.

It seems much like an Einstein client issue, but I might be wrong as well.

-Ionic

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
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Hi! The quoted error is

Hi!

The quoted error is quite rare and it's strange that you have two PCs consistently suffereing from them. Are your PCs overclocked? are they co-loated in the same room? You are not living in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor, right :-) :-) (just kidding)?

For the Pentium M, you might want to try the Linux / Intel "Power User App" discussed here. Unfortunaletly your PIII-S doesn't support it.

This version does floating point calculations differently. Whatever is causing this errors, with some luck it won't occur in the Power User app.

CU
Bikeman

BTW: The fact that other programs are not crashing is not really proving anything. The E@H app contains special code to catch these error conditions, older versions of the E@H would have continued as well for some time unless it ran into some random secondary error condition.

Modi
Modi
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Hey, no, I would never

Hey,

no, I would never overclock any PC. :)

Heh, yeah, they are on the same room, but that room is quite cool everytime. I don't like hot temperatures. ;)

Thanks, I will have a look at that...

One more thing: I guess the Pentium-III-S's and Pentium-M's architectures are quite close together, isn't it? Well anyways... I will try to upgrade to the latest glibc in a few weeks (I'm using 2.5 whereas 2.6 is current stable) and rebuild everything, in the hope, that it might magically solve some of my problems. :)

And I will try that other binary on my Laptop, I hope it'll solve at least the one on my Lap. :)

Thank you for your help,

-Ionic

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
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RE: One more thing: I

Message 76603 in response to message 76602

Quote:

One more thing: I guess the Pentium-III-S's and Pentium-M's architectures are quite close together, isn't it?

Indeed, the Pentium M is an enhanced Pentium III-S. Among other things, support for the SSE2 instruction set was added and this is required by the current build of the Linux/Intel Power user app.

CU
Bikeman

Modi
Modi
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Yes, I know that too well.

Yes, I know that too well. :)

I made a full backup of my Laptop before getting it repaired, mounted the harddisk via loop on my Desktop and nearly EVERY command produced SIGILL - that was my first contact with SSE2 No-SSE2. :)

Anyways, I hope I'll have some luck with that.
SIGFPE is indeed rather unusual, on my Router (200MHz MIPS32) I could "produce" it by installing binutils-2.18 with uClibc 0.9.27... it was horrible, every binutils program exited with SIGFPE and did just nothing. Later, I read that binutils-2.18 is not compatible with that old uClibc anymore... bad luck. :/

Thus I thought that my "old" glibc could cause that problem and I hope that upgrading will help... we'll see. :)

By the way, Dual PIII-S rocks, isn't it? Unfortunately, I just have a single board, but two of those CPUs. Though, buying a dual board would cause astronomic costs because I would have to replace nearly everything, even the RAM (EEC is a must on dual boards). :(

Hope you enjoy it anyways. :)

-Ionic

Modi
Modi
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Hi, well you are indeed

Hi,

well you are indeed right, with that new version I do not get SIGFPE anymore, but this time some other errors which look just MORE critical, could you please have a look at it? (The last result on sui.lan.)

-Ionic

Desti
Desti
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Do you have installed some

Do you have installed some unstable libs?

Modi
Modi
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Not that I would know.

Not that I would know. :(

-Ionic

Desti
Desti
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Or made a major GCC upgrade

Or made a major GCC upgrade without rebuilding system libs?

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