Some Sad News

Unfortunately, since I've gone on to graduate school, I haven't had the time to keep up work on Cichlid; development has stagnated, and some of the newer features are "dying on the vine". If you've been wondering why you haven't seen any updates or snapshots for a really long time, now you know.

Mesa 3.1 Update

The Mesa 3D graphics library has been updated. Surprisingly, when I installed Mesa 3.1 and tried Cichlid out, things failed horribly, with lots of SIGFPE cores. This was on a FreeBSD 3.2-R system, which does not by default mask floating-point exceptions. One particularly spooky repeatable failure occurred when moving the camera around a graph that wasn't animating [and so was being drawn out of a single display list]; at particular orientations, Mesa would die while executing the display list. Changing the build setup to disable the x86 assembly modules [and use C instead] seemed to fix the worst ones, but it still doesn't seem as stable as Mesa 3.0. Furthermore, there appears to be some problems with Mesa 3.1's display list implementation or NURBS renderer, since using the two together (putting NURBS surfaces in display lists) can lead to all KINDS of screwy behavior, from the generation of very strange-looking surfaces to having glCallList() calls that get into infinite loops.

All in all, I'm going to stick with Mesa 3.0 for a while. If I get some time, I'll probably put together a simple test case and contact the Mesa authors with it.

If you come up with a neat server for Cichlid, please drop us a line and tell us what uses you've found for our tool! Comments and suggestions are welcome too.

Have fun!

Cichlid is written and maintained by the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR)'s Measurement & Operations Analysis Team (MOAT), located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). This work is funded in part by NSF Cooperative Agreement No. ANI-9807479.

This site is maintained by Jeff Brown; reachable at jabrown(at)nlanr.net.