[Rd] c-c problem when R compiled with pthread

Luke Tierney luke@stat.umn.edu
Fri, 22 Feb 2002 12:58:16 -0600


Sounds like a thread started by MKL or Atlas is not masking SIGINT
signals and has a default SIGINT handler. If MKL/Atlas do not provide
a way of getting their worker threads to ignore interrupts (which is
probably the only safe thing they can do) then this may be a tough one
to solve.
  
I suspect you would have the same problem in ESS/Gnome if you fire up
a long-enough-running calculation that uses BLAS and C-c that (if you
have 2 processors you might have this problem about 50% of the time
and possibly something worse the other 50%, depending on how they do
things).
  
Running strace might help figure out in more detail what is happening.

luke

On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 12:59:35PM -0500, Liaw, Andy wrote:
> Dear R-devel,
> 
> I've run into this problem that when I hit c-c to interrupt a command or
> computation, the R session just ends.
> 
> The info: R-1.4.1 compiled from source on Linux Mandrake 7.1.  Dual P-3 Xeon
> with 2GB ram.
> 
> 1.  Compiled R with link to Intel Math Kernel Library (for fast BLAS), which
> needed pthread.  C-c at the R prompt ends the R session.
> 
> 2.  Compiled R with link to (threaded) ATLAS, which again needed pthread.
> Same thing happened.  However,
> I tried running this version of R under ESS, and c-c c-c works fine.
> Pressing the "interrupt" button in the R gnome interface also worked fine.
> 
> 3.  Compiled R without link to MKL or ATLAS.  C-c works as expected.
> 
> This seems to suggest pthread as the problem.  Can anyone offer
> clues/solutions?  
> 
> Regards,
> Andy 
> 
> Andy I. Liaw, PhD
> Biometrics Research          Phone: (732) 594-0820
> Merck & Co., Inc.              Fax: (732) 594-1565
> P.O. Box 2000, RY70-38            Rahway, NJ 07065
> mailto:andy_liaw@merck.com
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Luke Tierney
University of Minnesota                      Phone:           612-625-7843
School of Statistics                         Fax:             612-624-8868
313 Ford Hall, 224 Church St. S.E.           email:      luke@stat.umn.edu
Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA                    WWW:  http://www.stat.umn.edu
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