[erlang-bugs] R14B02+ crashes on older hardware, Windows XP

[sgm]

On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@REDACTED> wrote:
> sgm writes:
>  > We have a field data collection application recently re-written to use
>  > CouchDB. It requires minimal computer resources, so a number of the
>  > notebooks we use are circa 2001/2002. All run Windows XP with SP2 or
>  > SP3, and we are using CouchDB 1.1.
>  >
>  > On the older machines, Erlang R14B02 and R14B03 crash almost
>  > immediately upon running werl or erl. R14B01 does not.
>  >
>  > I'm attaching a screenshot of the crash on one of the machines. In all
>  > cases it happens at the same point, almost immediately, is 100%
>  > reproducible, and no crash dump is generated.
>  >
>  > Here are the machines where it crashes:
>  >
>  > Dell Inspiron 2500, 1.0GHz Pentium III, 160MB RAM, system summary
>  > rctc11.txt attached
>  > Dell Inspiron 2600, 1.06GHz Celeron, 128MB RAM, system summary
>  > rctc12.txt attached
>  > Gateway Solo 9300, 750MHz Pentium III, 160MB RAM, system summary
>  > rctc16.txt attached
>  >
>  > For comparison, I'm also including this machine of similar vintage
>  > which does NOT crash:
>  >
>  > Dell Inspiron 2650, 1.7GHz Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, system summary
>  > rctc13.txt attached
>
> You need to rebuild the Erlang VM with the --enable-ethread-pre-pentium4-compatibility
> option.
>
> This is a big ugly bug in the Erlang VM.
>

Thanks Mikael, I suspected it was a CPU-related issue. You say it's a
bug, but the documented option implies it's intentional. Are you
suggesting the VM should detect the CPU at startup and load the
appropriate library?

Dave - Yes, we're using this build of yours
github.com/downloads/dch/couchdb/setup-couchdb-1.1.0+COUCHDB-1152_otp_R14B03.exe.
Switching to this one
setup-couchdb-1.1.0+COUCHDB-1152_otp_R14B01+OTP-9139.exe works,
although we get sporadic Futon test suite failures. However, the
failed test usually works when we re-run it individually. Haven't done
much testing of our application yet. Thanks for posting these builds!

Steve