R devel - Apr 2013 - Linux distribution with gcc 4.8 and AddressSanitizer ?

Dear R developers,

I've got an information from Prof. Ripley regarding a bug found with 
AdressSanitizer in one of our packages. It is now fixed, thank you for 
this information.

Now, I would like to run AddressSanitizer myself before submitting the 
patched package to CRAN.

Is there a recommendation of a suitable Linux distribution with gcc 4.8, 
ideally an ISO image or (even better) a virtual appliance for VMware or 
VirtalBox? My Debian Wheezy machines have only 4.7.2.

Thank you

Thomas Petzoldt


-- 
Dr. Thomas Petzoldt
Technische Universitaet Dresden
Faculty of Environmental Sciences
Institute of Hydrobiology
01062 Dresden, Germany

E-Mail: thomas.petzoldt at tu-dresden.de
http://tu-dresden.de/Members/thomas.petzoldt

On Thursday 18 April 2013 17:38:06 Thomas Petzoldt
wrote:
> Dear R developers,
> 
> I've got an information from Prof. Ripley regarding a bug found with 
> AdressSanitizer in one of our packages. It is now fixed, thank you for 
> this information.
> 
> Now, I would like to run AddressSanitizer myself before submitting the 
> patched package to CRAN.
> 
> Is there a recommendation of a suitable Linux distribution with gcc 4.8, 
> ideally an ISO image or (even better) a virtual appliance for VMware or 
> VirtalBox? My Debian Wheezy machines have only 4.7.2.
> 
> Thank you
> 
> Thomas Petzoldt
I am not sure about all the requisites above (regarding the virtual appliances
although I know that they are available) but Fedora 19 (Alpha) that will be
released today has gcc 4.8.

Even although it has the Alpha moniker, and the corresponding stage, it is
relatively stable and thus suitable for your requirements.

Regards,
-- 
Jos? Ab?lio

On 18/04/2013 16:38, Thomas Petzoldt wrote:
> Dear R developers,
>
> I've got an information from Prof. Ripley regarding a bug found with
> AddressSanitizer in one of our packages. It is now fixed, thank you for
> this information.
>
> Now, I would like to run AddressSanitizer myself before submitting the
> patched package to CRAN.
>
> Is there a recommendation of a suitable Linux distribution with gcc 4.8,
> ideally an ISO image or (even better) a virtual appliance for VMware or
> VirtalBox? My Debian Wheezy machines have only 4.7.2.
>
> Thank you
>
> Thomas Petzoldt
>
gcc 4.8.0 has only been released for 4 weeks, so I doubt any released 
distro has it.  Fedora Rawhide (19-to-be) has it, and so I am told does 
Debian experimental.

I compiled gcc myself from the sources, but my sysadmins offered to make 
a Rawhide virtual machine or live DVD for me.

For those who do not know what AddressSanitizer is, see 
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-exts.html#Using-gctorture-and-memory-access
.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

It works!

After some hours of compilation, reading the docs and testing,
I got it now working and was able to reproduce (and fix) the
reported error message.

Then ingredients of the successful AdressSanitizer (ASAN)
system were:

- Fedora 19 Alpha RC4 with gcc 4.8 on VirtualBox,
- manual installation of several additional libraries
   especially libasan-devel,
- setting of Makevars and a few environment variables,
- compilation of R-devel (2013-04-19) with address-sanitizer
   (and --enable-strict barrier)
   ==> the compilation of R itself went through
       without problems so that R runs without crash.

Finally:
- compilation and ASAN check of the affected package
   that reproduced the error message.
- bugfix and successful final test.


Maybe this was not the most parsimonious approach ;-)
but using a suitable self-compiled R seems to be unavoidable.



Again, many thanks for your help and the great R system!

Thomas P.



-- 
Thomas Petzoldt
Technische Universitaet Dresden
Faculty of Environmental Sciences
Institute of Hydrobiology
01062 Dresden, Germany

E-Mail: thomas.petzoldt at tu-dresden.de
http://tu-dresden.de/Members/thomas.petzoldt