[Paraview] ParaView Seg Faults when running Animation in a Programmable Filter

[Omid Mahabadi]

Hi,
I've been experiencing a very weird seg faults in various versions of
ParaView (4.1.x, 4.2.0, 4.3.x) when running an animation (streaming over
time) of my Programmable Filter. I'm not even sure this is a ParaView
issue, but I'll still share my story in case someone has any insights
that they can kindly share.

My Programmable Filter code works fine for the Current time step,
regardless at which time step I run it (i.e., hit the Apply button of
the Programmable Filter). However, when I hit the Play button to loop
over time steps (which appends some information to a CSV file), ParaView
seg faults after reaching the /3rd time step/. The filter has been
working for some time and this started to happen all of a sudden,
without any system update.

It may be related to a weird combination of hardware, software, and
drivers. My script works fine on a desktop computer I have but it seg
faults on my main workstation, which has an AMD/ATI Radeon R9 280x GPU
running on Linux Mint 15, 64-bit. When I completely removed the AMD
drivers, it still seg faulted but after reaching the /6th time step/
after the current one. Then, I launched an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit, live
on a USB flash drive. The script in Programmable Filter worked perfectly
fine. As a result, I installed the OS, but it acted up exactly as the
Linux Mint installation.

The input files are massive vtk unstructured grids (about 800 MB each).
I created smaller files, but unfortunately I couldn't reproduce the
error. But I'm fairly sure that the files are not corrupted. As such, I
can't send out the files that cause the issue. I also monitored the
memory usage using free -h command while Playing. Here's the output for
the "-/+ buffers/cache" line:

                         total       used       free
    -/+ buffers/cache:       7.2G       8.4G (Opening the .vtu files)
    -/+ buffers/cache:       7.2G       8.4G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       7.4G       8.2G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       7.6G       8.0G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       7.6G       8.0G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       7.6G       8.0G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       7.9G       7.7G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.3G       7.4G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.5G       7.1G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.6G       7.0G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.5G       7.1G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.5G       7.1G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.5G       7.1G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.5G       7.1G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.6G       7.0G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       8.9G       6.7G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       9.1G       6.5G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       9.3G       6.3G
    -/+ buffers/cache:       9.4G       6.2G (Seg faults here)
    -/+ buffers/cache:       7.0G       8.6G

As you can see, my system still had a lot of free memory when the seg
fault happened and I haven't done anything explicitly to limit memory
usage by a single process.

Looking at syslog, this is the error message for the seg fault:

    kernel: [77995.911073] paraview[22483]: segfault at 7f3c8e0398ac ip
    00007f3a47ebe169 sp 00007fff9106ab50 error 4 in
    fglrx_dri.so[7f3a479e9000+21e9000]


Am I missing something here? Is there any other debugging steps I should
take? Any insights or help will be hugely appreciated.

Thank you,
Omid

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