\subsection faq_compiling Compiling SimGrid
+First of all, you need to download the latest version of SimGrid from
+<a href="http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/?group_id=12">here</a>.
Suppose you have uncompressed SimGrid in some temporary location of
your home directory (say <tt>/home/joe/tmp/simgrid-3.0.1 </tt>). The
simplest way to use SimGrid is to install it in your home
make install
\endverbatim
-If at some point, something fails, you can report this problem to the list
-but, please, avoid sending a laconic mail like "There is a problem. Is it
-normal?". Send the config.log file which is automatically generated by
-configure. Try to capture both the standard output and the error output of
-the <tt>make</tt> command with <tt>script</tt>. There is no way for us to
-help you without the relevant bits of information.
+If at some point, something fails, check the section "\ref
+faq_compil_trouble". If it does not help, you can report this problem to the
+list but, please, avoid sending a laconic mail like "There is a problem. Is it
+okay?". Send the config.log file which is automatically generated by
+configure. Try to capture both the standard output and the error output of the
+<tt>make</tt> command with <tt>script</tt>. There is no way for us to help you
+without the relevant bits of information.
Now, the following directory should have been created :
\verbatim export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
\endverbatim
+
+\subsection faq_compiling_cvs Compiling SimGrid from the CVS
+
+First of all, you need to get the "simgrid" module from
+<a href="http://gforge.inria.fr/scm/?group_id=12">here</a>.
+
+You won't find any <tt>configure</tt> and a few other things
+(<tt>Makefile.in</tt>'s, documentation, ...) will be missing as
+well. The reason for that is that all these files have to be
+regenerated using the latest versions of <tt>autoconf</tt>,
+<tt>automake</tt> (1.9) and <tt>doxygen</tt>. To generate the
+<tt>configure</tt> and the <tt>Makefile.in</tt>'s, you just have to
+launch the <tt>bootstrap</tt> command that resides in the top of the
+source tree. Then just follow the instructions of Section
+\ref faq_compiling.
+
+We insist on the fact that you really need the latest versions of
+autoconf and automake. Doing this step on exotic architectures/systems
+(i.e. anything different from a recent linux distribution) may be
+... uncertain. If you want to use the CVS version on another
+architecture/system, you should do the previous steps on a perfectly
+standard box, then do a <tt>make dist</tt> that will build you a
+perfectly portable SimGrid archive.
+
\subsection faq_setting Setting up your own code
Do not build your simulator by modifying the SimGrid examples. Go
\section faq_simgrid I'm new to SimGrid. I have some questions. Where should I start?
You are at the right place... Having a look to these
-<a href="http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~alegrand/articles/Simgrid-Introduction.pdf">slides</a>
+<a href="http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~alegrand/articles/slides_g5k_simul.pdf">slides</a>
+(or to these
+<a href="http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~alegrand/articles/Simgrid-Introduction.pdf">"obsolete" slides</a>)
may give you some insights on what SimGrid can help you to do and what
are its limitations. Then you definitely should read the \ref
MSG_examples. There is also a mailing list: <simgrid-user@lists.gforge.inria.fr>.
\section faq_troubleshooting Troubleshooting
+\subsection faq_compil_trouble ./configure fails!
+
+We now only one reason for the configure to fail:
+
+ - <b>You are using a borken build environment</b>\n
+ If symptom is that configure complains about gcc not being able to build
+ executables, you are probably missing the libc6-dev package. Damn Ubuntu.
+
+If you experience other kind of issue, please get in touch with us. We are
+always interested in improving our portability to new systems.
+
\subsection faq_distcheck_fails Dude! "make check" fails on my machine!
Don't assume we never run this target, because we do. Really. Promise!
4.0 gcc compiler. This version happens to be completely unusable, and you
should install a gcc-3.4 compiler and change the /usr/bin/gcc link to let
it point on /usr/bin/gcc-3.4.
- - <b>You are using a borken build environment</b>\n
- If symptom is that configure complains about gcc not being able to build
- executables, you are probably missing the libc6-dev package. Damn Ubuntu.
- <b>You are using a borken libc (probably concerning the contextes)</b>.\n
The symptom is that the "make check" fails within the examples/msg directory.\n
By default, SimGrid uses something called ucontexts. This is part of the
low, you'll get a segfault. The token ring example, which is quite simple,
runs with 40kb stacks.
+\subsection faq_longjmp longjmp madness
+
+This is when valgrind starts complaining about longjmp things, just like:
+
+\verbatim ==21434== Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s)
+==21434== at 0x420DBE5: longjmp (longjmp.c:33)
+==21434==
+==21434== Use of uninitialised value of size 4
+==21434== at 0x420DC3A: __longjmp (__longjmp.S:48)
+\endverbatim
+
+or even when it reports scary things like:
+
+\verbatim ==24023== Warning: client switching stacks? SP change: 0xBE3FF618 --> 0xBE7FF710
+x86->IR: unhandled instruction bytes: 0xF4 0xC7 0x83 0xD0
+==24023== to suppress, use: --max-stackframe=4194552 or greater
+==24023== Your program just tried to execute an instruction that Valgrind
+==24023== did not recognise. There are two possible reasons for this.
+==24023== 1. Your program has a bug and erroneously jumped to a non-code
+==24023== location. If you are running Memcheck and you just saw a
+==24023== warning about a bad jump, it's probably your program's fault.
+==24023== 2. The instruction is legitimate but Valgrind doesn't handle it,
+==24023== i.e. it's Valgrind's fault. If you think this is the case or
+==24023== you are not sure, please let us know.
+==24023== Either way, Valgrind will now raise a SIGILL signal which will
+==24023== probably kill your program.
+==24023==
+==24023== Process terminating with default action of signal 4 (SIGILL)
+==24023== Illegal opcode at address 0x420D234
+==24023== at 0x420D234: abort (abort.c:124)
+\endverbatim
+
+This is the sign that you didn't used the exception mecanism well. Most
+probably, you have a <tt>return;</tt> somewhere within a <tt>TRY{}</tt>
+block. This is <b>evil</b>, and you must not do this. Did you read the section
+about \ref XBT_ex??
+
\subsection faq_flexml_limit I get the message "surf_parse_lex: Assertion `next<limit' failed."
This is because your platform file is too big for the parser.
the development of FleXML, I can grant you that any patches would be really
welcome and quickly integrated.
+\subsection faq_gras_transport GRAS spits networking error messages
+
+Gras, on real platforms, naturally use regular sockets to communicate. They
+are deeply hiden in the gras abstraction, but when things go wrong, you may
+get some weird error messages. Here are some example, with the probable
+reason:
+
+ - <b>Transport endpoint is not connected</b>: several processes try to open
+ a server socket on the same port number of the same machine. This is
+ naturally bad and each process should pick its own port number for this.\n
+ Maybe, you just have some processes remaining from a previous experiment
+ on your machine.\n
+ Killing them may help, but again if you kill -KILL them, you'll have to
+ wait for a while: they didn't close there sockets properly and the system
+ needs a while to notice that this port is free again.
+
+ - <b>Socket closed by remote side</b>: if the remote process is not
+ supposed to close the socket at this point, it may be dead.
+
+ - <b>Connection reset by peer</b>: I found this on internet about this
+ error. I think it's what's happening here, too:\n
+ <i>This basically means that a network error occurred while the client was
+ receiving data from the server. But what is really happening is that the
+ server actually accepts the connection, processes the request, and sends
+ a reply to the client. However, when the server closes the socket, the
+ client believes that the connection has been terminated abnormally
+ because the socket implementation sends a TCP reset segment telling the
+ client to throw away the data and report an error.\n
+ Sometimes, this problem is caused by not properly closing the
+ input/output streams and the socket connection. Make sure you close the
+ input/output streams and socket connection properly. If everything is
+ closed properly, however, and the problem persists, you can work around
+ it by adding a one-second sleep before closing the streams and the
+ socket. This technique, however, is not reliable and may not work on all
+ systems.</i>\n
+ Since GRAS sockets are closed properly (repeat after me: there is no bug
+ in GRAS), it is either that you are closing your sockets on server side
+ before the client get a chance to read them (use gras_os_sleep() to delay
+ the server), or the server died awfully before the client got the data.
+
+
\subsection faq_deadlock There is a deadlock !!!
Unfortunately, we cannot debug every code written in SimGrid. We
