MATLAB: Incompatibilities between JVM and MEX

crashjvmmex

I'm trying to create a MEX file which allows me to use a Robotics Toolkit libraries, MRPT, which has a quite big amount of dependencies as can be seen in http://www.mrpt.org/Building_and_Installing_Instructions. Namely, I'm using some classes which involve the use of drivers and read from an Hokuyo LIDAR. For that, I have also used mexplus (C++ MEX development kit) when creating the MEX files. Due to TLS problems with Matlab I compiled all MRPT libraries as static. Having done so, I encounter following situation when trying to use my MEX functions: – If I begin Matlab normally, and execute my MEX function Matlab crashes. – If I begin Matlab from terminal, with -nodesktop option, and execute my MEX functions from terminal, all works fine (it does not crash) – If I begin Matlab from terminal, with -nodesktop, then make some operation involving jvm such as plot(…), and later use my MEX functions, it does not immediately crash but after a random time, it will finally crash.
I don't understand what kind of incompatibility could arise from the use of Matlab and my libraries all together, or if it could be a bug related to graphics interface of Matlab.
Edit: I'm running on Linux, in Xubuntu 14.04

Best Answer

First guess is that one of the libraries you are using is installing a signal handler. Any third party signal handler is likely incompatible with Matlab's and will cause instability especially with the JVM.
Identify which library is doing it and disable it's signal handler.
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