Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: For engine authors, end-of-file on input

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 04:13:29 04/14/04

Go up one level in this thread


On April 14, 2004 at 07:04:17, Fabien Letouzey wrote:

>On April 14, 2004 at 06:46:56, Sune Fischer wrote:
>
>>I'm testing it with Arena which crashes on me in multipv mode.
>
>!!!
>
>>My guess that there is a problem with printing to stdout after the pipe has been
>>closed.
>
>Yes, that's "broken pipe".
>In theory we should be ready for it anytime, but nobody checks the return value
>of printf().
>
>Note that there should be two pipes for input and output, but that does not
>change anything.

What do I do when it doesn't return at all?

>>I record all communication to a log file and what I see is that the search stops
>>between iterations, frenzee hangs at 0 cpu load, Arena pops up an access
>>violation box and stops responding so I have to kill it with the task manager.
>
>That's "OK", but the OS should close Arena's side of the pipes then.
>That's how you could notice (in an OS-independent way) that the GUI is gone.
>
>>Occasionally I get a few hundred runtime error boxes which nearly crashes the
>>entire system, luckily these close themselves after a few seconds.
>
>It might just "outputting" to the broken pipe.
>If the output pipe is closed, each printf() generates its own error.
>It should be nowhere near crashing the system of course.
>
>It might not be that because the xboard protocol is not that verbose.
>
>>I suspect frenzee is trying to print information to Arena which no longer
>>recieves input. Who is crashing who here I don't know, but it would be nice if
>>frenzee exitted after I kill Arena with the task manager.
>
>You should be able to notice that by seeing the input pipe beeing closed.
>It might not be true on Windows though ...
>
>Does Frenzee quit peacefully in a console when you press ctrl-Z?

No I get ^Z in the console window.
It exits fine when I type ctrl-C however, that's the normal kill command so
maybe that's what you mean?

>>I will try some more experiments to see if I can figure out what is going on.
>
>I have got problems with PolyGlot and many engines, I think our problems are
>related.

I've never had this problem before that I can recall, but I guess each crash is
unique in its own way.

-S.
>Fabien.



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.