gtkwave v3.3.58 crashes a lot because libjudy is built wrong

[Timothy Miller]

I've used gtkwave for years, and it's been rock solid. However, the version that installs in 14.04.1 LTS crashes at the drop of a hat. From what I can determine from googling this problem, it appears that this issue has been observed before, and it's caused by libjudy being built incorrectly. See this discussion:

https://sourceforge.net/p/gtkwave/mailman/message/32631433/

Since this is an LTS, I'm guessing you should fix libjudy and then provide the update so that we can pull in the fixed packages via apt-get.

When starting gtkwave, I see lots of messages like this that I've never seen with any other installation of gtkwave:

JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x60ec900 blocked
JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x60fc920 blocked
JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x610c940 blocked
JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x611c960 blocked
JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x612c980 blocked
JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x613c9a0 blocked
JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x614c9c0 blocked
JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x615c9e0 blocked
JUDYMEM | free to non-malloc'd address 0x616ca00 blocked

Something I do a lot is reload the waveform. These are the sorts of errors I get just before it crashes:

GTKWAVE | Reloading waveform...
*** Error in `gtkwave': double free or corruption (out): 0x0000000001001200 ***
GTKWAVE | Reloading waveform...
*** Error in `gtkwave': munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer: 0x00000000030000d0 ***

[berndl (bernd-leppla)]

>Since this is an LTS, I'm guessing you should fix libjudy and then provide the update so that we
>can pull in the fixed packages via apt-get.

I too want to highlight this. I'm using gtkwave together with ghdl, a free VHDL simulator available via ppa. I've observed this bug since last year, when I upgraded to 14.04LTS from 12.04LTS. Sometimes gtkwave works correct, sometimes I observe the exactly same behaviour as described above...

I would really be more than happy if somebody could fix the broken libjudy... (or provide at least a detailed workaround about how to build libjudy from source so I can do my work. Since I'm not a Linux-Guru, I really have no idea, how to do this...).

[bybell (bybell)]

Was this ever fixed by the Judy maintainer?

I just installed 14.04LTS on a new machine last night and saw crash on reload when I built gtkwave-3.3.68 from source. I suppose I'll have to experiment further. The FSDB waves I looked at were from an enormous model, so this would definitely stress any compiler optimization bugs in Judy. My temporary workaround is to skip --enable-judy in the ./configure command line. I haven't yet rebuilt Judy from source either skipping optimization or instead using clang. I'll have to experiment.

BTW, I have no trouble at all with such crashes on my CentOS/RHEL machines, so this seems to indicate that there is either a lingering problem or that I built gtkwave before an updated Judy (if such a thing is available) installed itself onto my machine.

Thanks,
-Tony