Re: [fem-fenics] Problem with the examples

[Marco Vassallo]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 7:54 PM, Eugenio Gianniti <address@hidden> wrote:

Dear all,

I’ve been trying hard to have the fem-fenics package work, but so far no success. I had a seemingly good build of Octave core, with 06970f4625b (stable) changeset:

Summary:

  PASS     11521
  FAIL         0
  XFAIL        7
  SKIPPED     38

The skipped tests are the whole jit suite, since it was disabled by default configuring without options, and a couple related to hdf5, since it is missing in my system due to the compatibility issue with gmsh [1], which is a dependency of the msh package. I am now on Ubuntu 13.10.

After that I installed from Forge the packages splines, msh and fem-fenics. To do so I did export CPPFLAGS=“-I/usr/include/eigen3 $(mpicxx -showme:compile)” as suggested in [2]. Then export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/openmpi/lib/libmpi.so as suggested in [3]. With this environment if I launch Octave, load fem-fenics and run femfenics_examples I experience a crash or a freeze after choosing one of them to see.

Hi Eugenio,

it his a really good start building successfully octave and fem-fenics. Since the last version of Octave (>= 4.0) I also get some strange behaviour when plotting, but I'm not been able to figure out why.

Try running the examples without doing the final plot but instead save the results and view them with some dedicated application (paraview for example). If the results with paraview are fine and fem-fenics no longer crashes without the plot, I think that we have reached a good point and we can stop coding for a while and start thinking about the feature plan for fem-fenics (and among them we should include to fix the issues with the plot). 

Marco

I investigated the issue with the builtin debugger and, for instance using Poisson.m, I found out that the script is executed successfully except for the final plot(u); instruction, that causes Octave to crash or freeze. I always say that Octave crashes or freezes because it exits abruptly with a quite random behaviour: sometimes there is a crash and I get on the terminal a signal 11 error message, in other cases I get a signal 6. Moreover, sometimes Octave silently aborts leaving a dump octave-workspace and sometimes it just freezes. These times I need to force quit both Octave and the launching terminal. 

When using Octave GUI I never obtained a successful run of the examples, whilst using the CLI I was able to run example 1, Poisson, successfully, 2 and 3 without a failure of Octave, but with empty plots, eventually 4 with an abort and core dump.

I would kindly ask for guidance in further troubleshooting this issue.

Eugenio

[1] http://wiki.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=Octave_for_Debian_systems&oldid=4061

[2] http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/FORGE-Fem-fenics-installation-fails-tp4661997p4662007.html

[3] http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/fem-fenics-0-0-1-released-tp4662182p4662234.html