[KinoSearch] solaris

[Marvin Humphrey]

On Feb 24, 2008, at 10:31 AM, meir wrote:

> I have an extensive system in perl getting built on solaris sparc  
> and I
> need a search engine and hoped to use KinoSearch.  This is for a
> university project.
>
> I built KinoSearch-0.162 using gcc 3.4.6 and perl 5.8.8.
> 'perl Build.PL' and 'perl Build' went well, but
> I got many errors in the 'perl Build test' step.

The pattern of errors is consistent with a failure somewhere during  
indexing.  I can nearly duplicate your failure fingerprint by  
inserting a strategically positioned exit() call in the C code.

Since the failure is so graceless, it's probably a memory error of  
some sort.  I have a sneaking suspicion about what might be happening:  
there are places where KS is dereferencing U32* pointers which should  
be word-aligned but are not.

For an explanation of memory alignment, see these posts of mine to  
Perl 5 Porters:

http://xrl.us/bgpfe (Link to www.nntp.perl.org)
http://xrl.us/bgpfc (Link to www.nntp.perl.org)

The first post has a sample app.  If you can compile it on your  
Solaris box, but it blows up when you try to run it, we have our  
culprit.

The alignment issue has been fixed in the devel branch, and I know of  
at least one other Solaris user who has been unable to use the maint  
branch but is successfully using devel.  I suggest you try that.

Best,

Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research
http://www.rectangular.com/