Octave Crashes after running script

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-Apr-2009, Emmanuel De Paepe wrote:

| Octave crashes after running the following script:
| 
| % (2)
| runs = 3;
| cumulate = 0; b = 0;
| for i = 1:runs
|   a = randn(320, 320);
|   tic;
|     b = eig(a);
|   timing = toc;
|   cumulate = cumulate + timing;
| end
| timing = cumulate/runs;
| times(2, 2) = timing;
| disp(['Eigenvalues of a 320x320 random matrix______________ (sec): ' num2str(timing)])
| clear a; clear b;
| 
| 
| Octave version: Octave 3.0.5_1
| Operating system: FreeBSD 7.1 p4 AMD64
| Hardware: HP DL360 G4 one Xeon 3.4GHz (1MB L2 cache), 2GB PC2700 ECC memory.
| See attached Octave core dump.
| 
| Octave terminal output on crash:
| panic: Bus error: 10 -- stopping myself...
| attempting to save variables to `octave-core'...
| save to `octave-core' complete

I don't have 3.0.5 installed, but with 3.0.3 I see

  octave3.0:1> eig (randn(320,320));
  error: memory exhausted or requested size too large for range of Octave's index type -- trying to return to prompt

so there is a definitely a bug, but I'm not seeing the crash.

In any case, I can't duplicate this error with the current development
sources on my system, so I think the problem has been fixed for the
next release.

jwe