trouble running artiq master

Vanimiaou

Hello,

We've been using artiq_master for the last 6 months and it was running fine. During the weekend there was a power outage or something leading to our PC being restarted. I received the following error while opening artiq master:

(artiq) C:\Users\rydberg\artiq-master>artiq_master Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\envs\artiq\Scripts\artiq_master-script.py", line 9, in <module> sys.exit(main()) File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\envs\artiq\lib\site-packages\artiq\frontend\artiq_master.py", line 98, in main dataset_db = DatasetDB(args.dataset_db) File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\envs\artiq\lib\site-packages\artiq\master\databases.py", line 42, in __init__ file_data = pyon.load_file(self.persist_file) File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\envs\artiq\lib\site-packages\sipyco\pyon.py", line 228, in load_file return decode(f.read()) File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\envs\artiq\lib\site-packages\sipyco\pyon.py", line 211, in decode return eval(s, _eval_dict, {}) ValueError: source code string cannot contain null bytes

At first I thought some file was corrupted while writing and I went to clear the caches but it didn't work and still gave the same error. Then I proceed to reinstall artiq properly and have the device database file in the correct place but still received the same error. Can someone help me with this?

edit: Artiq_run and other thing still work, just not artiq master

thank you !

sb10q

Vanimiaou dataset_db = DatasetDB(args.dataset_db)

The problematic file is the dataset database, not the device database. What "caches" are you talking about?

You can install Linux and ZFS for improved resilience.

Vanimiaou

I've just used conda clean , I do not really know if it was helping with caches... I was just thinking there might be some broken files due to the fact computer was restarting while it was overwriting

All of our other softwares are running on Windows, it would be really good for us if we can keep using artiq on Windows

I've tried to reinstall as well but the same error persists

Edit: I just realized now that dataset_db is a cache file and it is not sufficient just useconda clean. You're right, the dataset_db file was broken, I've just deleted the dataset_db file and also last_rid, do a fresh run of aartiq_master again and it runs normally now. Thanks Sebastien!!

dreens

device db can get null bytes in it if you edit it with an editor using a different encoding. For example if you accidentally convert it to UTF16, it will look like every other character is a null byte when artiq reads it in with UTF8. This conversion can happen surreptitiously, for example if you run a "git show" command to get an older version out of your repo, but you do it in a shell environment with a windows encoding scheme. Your editor might auto-detect the encoding and just show you the file in UTF16 so you don't see the null bytes.

One tool that can help is to use linux/unix "cat" command but with flags that show non-printing characters.
"cat -vET [filename]"