Is there functionality built into ros to get nodes to print a stacktrace on crash?

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roscpp

asked 2011-05-11 16:28:02 -0500

Asomerville
2743 ●74 ●99 ●133 http://www.resquared.com/

updated 2012-02-27 13:31:11 -0500

When ROS nodes crash, modifying launch files to run under gdb is often required to get a stack trace. And a full reattempt to produce the conditions of the crash is necessary.

75% of crash failures (made up number :) could probably be solved without running in the debugger if we could see where the crash happened on each failure.

Is there functionality built into ROS to handle this?

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answered 2011-05-11 16:42:30 -0500

Asomerville
2743 ●74 ●99 ●133 http://www.resquared.com/

updated 2011-05-12 05:52:24 -0500

One option (which has nothing to do with ROS internals) is to set the ulimit on core file to be non-zero and then analyze the core after the crash. (By default the core size limit is set to 0 in Ubuntu)

Set to unlimited:

ulimit -c unlimited

This will cause the OS to produce a "core file" each time there is a crash which contains some of the info needed to recreate a stack trace. The other portion of the info is contained in the executable which crashed.

The core file ends up in ~/.ros and can be analyzed with gdb like so:

gdb --core=~/.ros/core  /path/to/stack/package/bin/mynode

... where a backtrace can be obtained by using the "backtrace" or "bt" command

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Has anyone had any luck doing this? The core file doesn't seem to turn up in ~/.ros for me...

dg-shadow ( 2017-05-23 11:22:26 -0500 )edit

Had the same problem as you, ROS kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04. Tried the /proc/sys... stuff here as well: http://wiki.ros.org/roslaunch/Tutoria...

alf ( 2017-10-04 06:38:44 -0500 )edit

I was able to follow this, my core dump was in /var/crash, and you can find the executable of a package folder using pkgname=<your package name>

catkin_find --first-only --without-underlays --libexec ${pkgname}

then after starting gdb with the top command, you can type bt, or where

Beshari ( 2022-08-25 18:41:03 -0500 )edit

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answered 2011-05-12 04:43:30 -0500

Straszheim
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There is not. You could ticket this as an enhancement...

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answered 2011-05-12 05:17:39 -0500

dornhege

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I think it is not necessary, when you build in debug mode. As you already said, you can just use a debugger to get the stacktrace information from the core.

Besides that, there is ROS_ASSERT, but that does only work on the crashes you somehow could predict.

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Is there functionality built into ros to get nodes to print a stacktrace on crash?

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