[daip] XAS trouble on an Intel Mac.

[Eric Greisen]

R. Craig Walker wrote:
> I have installed AIPS on my new Mac Pro desktop at home.  It seems to be
> working, except for the TV.  It starts, but then there is one error
> message and the TV never appears.  The login messages around where this is
> happening are:

> XAS: Using screen width 1910 height 1100,
>      max grey level 8191 in 16 grey-scale memories
> Shared memory id failure: Invalid argument
>
> I have no idea what to do about this.  Any hints?
> 
Try reading the AIPS Manager FAQ page:
       http://www.aips.nrao.edu/aipsmgr/

It will say

If you see this on a Mac, congratulations; you have one of the larger 
display screens. The default Mac system limits shared memory pages to 4 
Mbytes. When XAS starts it tells you that it is making a screen x pixels 
by y pixels. The memory you will need is at least  4 x y  bytes. For the 
new large screens this is more than 8 Mbytes. On 10.3 and 10.4 systems, 
you can change this limit by changing (as root or admin) the rc file in 
/etc, adjusting the kern.sysv.shm* line to

          #Setting the shared memory to something a bit more reasonable.
             sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=10485760
             sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmin=1
             sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmni=32
             sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmseg=8
             sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmall=4096


If you are really lucky and have a 30-inch screen (2550 by 1500 pixels) 
then you will have to make the shmmax line even larger

             sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=16777216


On the latest "leopard" systems, /etc/rc is gone and creating it will 
have no effect. You need to create an /etc/sysctl.conf file and put the 
values in it,

             kern.sysv.shmmax=10485760
             kern.sysv.shmmin=1
             kern.sysv.shmmni=32
             kern.sysv.shmseg=8
             kern.sysv.shmall=4096


You should use the values you had when you were running tiger. Those 
could be in /Previous\ System/etc/rc, assuming you have "Previous 
System". So three different OS upgrades and three different ways to 
adjust the default shared memory. Note: You will need to reboot the 
system for the change in shared memory to take place. You can check if 
the shared memory changes happened by typing "sysctl kern.sysv" in a 
terminal or xterm window. Look for the kern.sysv.shm* values. If the 
values have not changed, make sure you haven't inadvertently left in 
"sysctl -w" in the /etc/sysctl.conf file or mis-typed one of the values. 
If the /etc/sysctl.conf file is not properly formatted, or shmmax is not 
an integer multiple of shmall, the shared memory will not be adjusted 
after the reboot.

Eric


> FYI, I haven't tested much, but FITLD, MC, UC, EXTD, CNTR, VPLOT and TKPL
> all work as they should.  I need to try something challenging but so far,
> all are very fast, including VPLOT, and only one of the 8 cores (4
> hardware, each pretending to be 2) gets into the act (more for tkpl, but
> they are probably under 10% cpu each).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Craig
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>     R. Craig Walker            Array Operations Center
>     cwalker at nrao.edu           National Radio Astronomy Observatory
>     Phone  575 835 7247        P. O. Box O
>     Fax    575 835 7027        Socorro NM 87801   USA
> --------------------------------------------------------------web
> 
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