[mpich-discuss] Mpich failing electric-fence check

[Matthieu Dorier]

Hi, 

I wanted to debug a memory corruption in an MPI program using the electric-fence tool, and noticed that electric-fence detects an error already in MPI_Init (thus the program stops and I cannot debug the actual memory corruption that happens later). The following program is a minimal one to exemplify the error: 



#include <mpi.h> 

int main(int argc, char** argv) { 
MPI_Init(&argc,&argv); 
MPI_Finalize(); 
return 0; 
} 




The error output by electric-fence: 




ElectricFence Aborting: Allocating 0 bytes, probably a bug. 




And the backtrace output by gdb: 




Program received signal SIGILL, Illegal instruction. 
0x0012d422 in __kernel_vsyscall () 
(gdb) backtrace 
#0 0x0012d422 in __kernel_vsyscall () 
#1 0x0040c976 in kill () at ../sysdeps/unix/syscall-template.S:82 
#2 0x0012fc54 in EF_Abort () from /usr/lib/libefence.so.0 
#3 0x0012f71b in memalign () from /usr/lib/libefence.so.0 
#4 0x0012f88b in malloc () from /usr/lib/libefence.so.0 
#5 0x001e3b6b in MPID_nem_init () from /home/mdorier/deploy/lib/libmpich.so.10 
#6 0x001d2f4c in MPIDI_CH3_Init () from /home/mdorier/deploy/lib/libmpich.so.10 
#7 0x001c8c57 in MPID_Init () from /home/mdorier/deploy/lib/libmpich.so.10 
#8 0x0029d435 in MPIR_Init_thread () from /home/mdorier/deploy/lib/libmpich.so.10 
#9 0x0029cd33 in PMPI_Init () from /home/mdorier/deploy/lib/libmpich.so.10 
#10 0x0804859f in main (argc=1, argv=0xbffff994) at m.c:4 




The version of mpich is 3.0.4, gcc 4.6.4, on Ubuntu 10.4, linux kernel 2.6.32. 




I suspect a call to malloc with 0 as parameter, whose output is properly checked by Mpich, but makes electric-fence think there is an error. 

Matthieu Dorier 
PhD student at ENS Rennes 
http://people.irisa.fr/Matthieu.Dorier 
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