[wyldckat]

Dear OpenFOAM developers,

After various trial-and-errors with various distros and gcc 4.5.x versions, I've come to the conclusion that OpenFOAM's 1.6.x, 1.7.0 and 1.7.x versions (at least until today's 12pm UTC) have serious problems with the gcc 4.5 series.

List of distros/builds tested (all double precision):

• OpenFOAM 1.7.0, gcc 4.5.1 (edit: 20100730 (prerelease))+mingw-w64 for cross-compiling to Windows (both 32 and 64bits, pre-built cross-compilers from mingw-w64 sf.net project page);
• OpenFOAM 1.7.0, custom build of gcc 4.5.0 in Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64;
• OpenFOAM 1.7.x, system gcc 4.5.0 in OpenSUSE 11.3 i586.

With all of these builds, the following tutorials were detected to have failed to work properly:

• basic/potentialFoam/cylinder
• compressible/rhoPorousMRFPimpleFoam/mixerVessel2D
• electromagnetics/electrostaticFoam/chargedWire
• incompressible/MRFSimpleFoam/mixerVessel2D
• incompressible/nonNewtonianIcoFoam/offsetCylinder
• incompressible/simpleFoam/pitzDailyExptInlet
• incompressible/simpleSRFFoam/mixer
• multiphase/MRFInterFoam/mixerVessel2D
• stressAnalysis/solidDisplacementFoam/plateHole

Except for the pitzDailyExptInlet case, these tutorials failed at the blockMesh stage (it finishes successfully with no indication of error), apparently because they have arc edges in blockMeshDict. The generated meshes have no arc edges in them and the damaged values can be either very small (<10e-200) or very large (>10e-200); checkMesh gives various indications of the meshes being flawed.
The pitzDailyExptInlet case failed when running simpleFoam, quitting with a "DTRIS2 - Fatal error!" message (and respective stack dump); checkMesh doesn't give any indications that the mesh is flawed.

Additionally, I've seen another bug report made a few days ago that points to another issue that I didn't detect (since the applications didn't crash with that tutorial case), but it should also be because of OpenSUSE's 11.3 gcc 4.5.0: porousSimpleFoam bug in 1.7.x


So, in the short run, I suggest that you add a note in the source/git pages warning about gcc 4.5!
Because I remember that when OpenFOAM 1.6 was released, it simply didn't build with gcc 4.4, so that refrained most users from aimlessly using it and simply switched to the custom gcc 4.3.3 build. But in this case, it's seriously worse: OpenFOAM 1.6.x-1.7.x do build with gcc 4.5 and have no explicit warning (that I've seen) indicating that OpenFOAM might not work properly!


Side note for OpenSUSE 11.3 users: you can install gcc 4.3.4 in YaST, thus avoiding the need to do a custom gcc build.

Best regards,
Bruno


EDIT: see post #10 for the fix for OpenFOAM 1.6.x and 1.7.0. OpenFOAM 1.7.x is now fixed.