[Paraview] Segfault in Python when importing paraview.servermanager and vtk in the wrong order

[Maximilian Albert]

Hi all,

since this is my first post here, let me take the opportunity to thank
all the developers for their hard work and and for an immensely useful
piece of software! :)

I'm writing becasue I am having a problem with a very annoying
segfault related to Paraview scripting and hope someone can help me.
The following two lines when executed in a Python interpreter lead to
a segfault:

>>> import vtk
>>> import paraview.servermanager
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

However, if I do the imports the other way around then it works fine.

>>> import paraview.servermanager
paraview version 3.14.1, Date: 2012-02-17
>>> import vtk
>>>

This looks like it should be a very common bug to hit, but I couldn't
find anything on the web that looked similar. Does anybody have an
idea what could be causing this and how to work around it? It is quite
annoying because I'm using the FEniCS package [1] to run simulations
that I would like to visualize using Paraview, but FEniCS internally
imports vtk, so now all my simulation scripts have stopped working and
produce crashes. So any help would be much appreciated.

For the record, I am using Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS with the standard
Paraview version 3.14.1 that is shipped with it, but I also tried it
on another computer with version 3.98.0 from the PPA [2], and the
segfault also happens there. The backtrace from the coredump is
attached below in case it can be of any help.

Many thanks and best regards,
Max

[1] http://fenicsproject.org/
[2] http://ppa.launchpad.net/gladky-anton/paraview/ubuntu


=== Gdb session output with backtrace ===

$ GNU gdb (Ubuntu/Linaro 7.4-2012.04-0ubuntu2.1) 7.4-2012.04
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-linux-gnu".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://bugs.launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/>...
Reading symbols from /usr/bin/python...Reading symbols from
/usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/python2.7...done.
done.
[New LWP 20514]

warning: Can't read pathname for load map: Input/output error.
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".
Core was generated by `python'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
#1  0x00007f7ad64812ff in
vtkTCPNetworkAccessManager::vtkTCPNetworkAccessManager() () from
/usr/lib/paraview/libvtkPVClientServerCore.so
#2  0x00007f7ad648136d in vtkTCPNetworkAccessManager::New() () from
/usr/lib/paraview/libvtkPVClientServerCore.so
#3  0x00007f7ad6475a92 in vtkProcessModule::vtkProcessModule() () from
/usr/lib/paraview/libvtkPVClientServerCore.so
#4  0x00007f7ad6475b6d in vtkProcessModule::New() () from
/usr/lib/paraview/libvtkPVClientServerCore.so
#5  0x00007f7ad6475e1b in
vtkProcessModule::Initialize(vtkProcessModule::ProcessTypes, int&,
char**&) () from /usr/lib/paraview/libvtkPVClientServerCore.so
#6  0x00007f7acc4e987c in vtkInitializationHelper::Initialize(int,
char**, int, vtkPVOptions*) () from
/usr/lib/paraview/libvtkPVServerManager.so
#7  0x00007f7acc4ea62e in vtkInitializationHelper::Initialize(char
const*, int, vtkPVOptions*) () from
/usr/lib/paraview/libvtkPVServerManager.so
#8  0x00007f7acc8d8b45 in ?? () from
/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/vtkPVServerManagerPython.so
#9  0x0000000000497ea4 in PyEval_EvalFrameEx ()
#10 0x000000000049f1c0 in PyEval_EvalCodeEx ()
#11 0x00000000004a7f18 in PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx ()
#12 0x000000000053cde1 in load_source_module.39052 ()
#13 0x000000000053d7db in import_submodule.39106 ()
#14 0x00000000004fc1a3 in load_next.39111 ()
#15 0x000000000053e266 in import_module_level.isra.3.39132 ()
#16 0x00000000004c2e6b in builtin___import__.32787 ()
#17 0x00000000004e9f36 in PyObject_Call ()
#18 0x00000000004ea396 in PyEval_CallObjectWithKeywords ()
#19 0x000000000049a4ed in PyEval_EvalFrameEx ()
#20 0x000000000049f1c0 in PyEval_EvalCodeEx ()
#21 0x00000000004a9d0f in PyRun_InteractiveOneFlags ()
#22 0x00000000004aa075 in PyRun_InteractiveLoopFlags ()
#23 0x00000000004aa328 in PyRun_AnyFileExFlags ()
#24 0x00000000004aa8bd in Py_Main ()
#25 0x00007f7af885f76d in __libc_start_main () from
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
#26 0x000000000041b9b1 in _start ()