[R-pkg-devel] Debugging Clang ASAN errors

[Martin R. Smith]

A package I recently had accepted to CRAN is throwing up a "memory not
mapped" segfault on CRAN's post-acceptance fedora-clang ASAN test.  This
error does not occur with debian-clang or gcc.
(Check results:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_TBRDist.html)

I found a similar issue in the r-packages archives (
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2018q3/002907.html). The
suggestion in that case was that the issue may have been a false positive,
a possibility that is consistent with a "HINT" in the output log.

I optimistically suspect that this is the case here too: my package is an R
wrapper to a mature C library, and the segmentation fault arises during a
routine operation with simple input, not in some obscure corner case.  So
question one is: how might I confirm that this is indeed a false positive?

If it's not a false positive, then this raises the question of how I might
reproduce it, as a Windows user without access to a machine running Fedora.
rhub::check_with_sanitizers() uses debian, and returns 'success':
https://builder.r-hub.io/status/TBRDist_1.0.0.9000.tar.gz-b965d74e18dd4bdc8e51e4254ee3699a
Rocker (https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker) only offers a debian (not
fedora) environment, so looks like it will not reproduce the error.

Any thoughts would be gratefully received!

Thanks,

Martin


--

*Dr. Martin R. Smith*
Assistant Professor in Palaeontology
Durham University
Department of Earth Sciences
Mountjoy Site, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE United Kingdom

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