Re: [SLUG] MP3's causing Floating Point Exception.

[Andrew Dorrell <dorrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steven downing wrote:
> 
> I'm still trying to track down whats causing this. (see my missive last Wednesday - basically all mp3 programs are dying with SIGFPE - cyrix 6X86 - als100 soundcard - kernel 2.4.0-test7 - standard kernel sound drivers)
> I ran smpeg-gtv from potato and it changed the error message slightly. Now it says:
> SIGFPE: Floating Point Exception: SDL Parachute deployed.


The latter part of the message is generated by the SDL library (which
smpeg-gtv must be using for its sound services).  SDL is itself open
source so you might want to grab it and build a small program to help
pin down where the error is happening.  The main SDL page is at
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/


> Does this mean more to anyone else than it does to me?  smpeg also had more tenacity than any others as it actually played whole songs on at least three or four occasions before it died.
> xmms played .wav files fine, i setup a playlist and let it random repeat through it and came back about half an hour later and it was still running.  To be fair they were mostly pretty short (5-10 sec) but there were a couple over a minute long.  Might this make a difference.
> And as it happens to ALL mp3 programs I've tried so far I thought I'd find out what they have in common infrastructure-wise, and the only one is libc.so.6.
> So now I'm taking a crash course in gdb and Data Display Debugger....but most of my programming experience has been with scripting or beginner C, but none on Linux (YET!), so any gurus got some ideas on what to look out for?
> Failing that any good tips on debugging established programs (i.e not my own) in general?


Get the source and build your own local version of it so you actually
get debug info in your binary.  I also recommend running gdb from within
emacs as it will trace the source for you - from an emacs window type
<Alt>-X then gdb then <Enter>...


-- 
Andrew Dorrell