Problems with starting speakup, any chance of solving?

[Chris Brannon]

Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com> writes:

> Yes the problems started when just doing a standard upgrade in
> ArchLinux.

Hello,
I've used Speakup on four separate Arch Linux machines since kernel 3.0
was released.  No other Arch users are having your exact problem either,
it would seem.  I found your previous message.  Some code in Speakup is
trying to dereference a NULL pointer.

"kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000035
Sep 30 10:06:45 localhost kernel: [  342.096505] IP: [<f81910bb>] 
speakup_init+0xbb/0x28a [speakup]"

That doesn't help too much, but we do know which function contains the
bug: speakup_init.  I read through that code, and as far as I can tell,
we're checking for NULL in all the places that we should be checking.

If I were debugging this on my own box, I'd probably do
the following.

1. Find Speakup source.  Edit main.c, and liberally sprinkle
speakup_init with "progress" messages, such as
pr_info("Successfully reached line X\n");
2. Recompile speakup.  Replace the existing modules with the new ones,
and run depmod -a.
3. modprobe speakup
4. Use the progress messages to find the line of code that is causing
us problems.

A few iterations of this edit-compile-load cycle may be required, but it
will work when you are dealing with this kind of a non-fatal crash.
At least you aren't getting lock-ups, and you can look at the logs.

How else can I help you with this?

-- Chris