Serious bug identified in SmartDashboard/NetworkTables -- robot hangs

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by MamaSpoldi

At the risk of sounding ignorant in this excellent technical discussion...

Am I correct in thinking that even if we do not explicitly perform any NetworkTables operations that we could be affected by the bug in question and therefore need the update? We use the SmartDashboard only for simple display operations, eg. calling PutXXX to display values on the dashboard screen. It sounds like these operations use the NetworkTables behind the scenes and are therefore subject to this issue. So I wanted to verify if we need to install the update.

FYI, we are using C++ on the robot and the SmartDashboard on the driverstation.

Also, does this update include a change to the .jar file for the dashboard implementation which runs on the driverstation laptop or just a change to the library code built into the application that runs on the cRIO? I ask so that we know if it needs to be installed on the driverstation as well as the programming laptop.

Thanks.

Yes, SmartDashboard operations in C++ uses NetworkTables underneath the covers. You should apply the update.

The driver station SmartDashboard jar is not affected by this update.

Speaking to the update's stability: Our team uses python, which has an earlier version of the update applied. We did not experience a single freeze/lockup event during our regional last weekend.