Segmentation fault when using requests/pynetbox with pyATS on Apple Silicon macOS

[geortich]

Description

When using the requests library (directly or via pynetbox) with pyATS on macOS with Apple Silicon, the process crashes with a segmentation fault during fork pre-exec. The same code works perfectly when run in a Linux environment (Docker).

Environment

• OS: macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 and 14.7.1 (tested on both M1 and M2 architectures)
• Python: 3.11, 3.12.5 and 3.12.7
• pyATS: 24.7, 24.9, and 24.10 (issue present in all versions)
• requests: 2.31.0 and 2.32.3 (issue present in both versions)
• Architecture: Apple Silicon (M1 and M2)
• HTTP or HTTPS API calls

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a simple test using requests within pyATS:

from pyats import aetest
import logging
import requests

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO)

class TestRequests(aetest.Testcase):
    @aetest.setup
    def setup(self):
        self.url = "http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1"

    @aetest.test
    def test_simple_request(self):
        response = requests.get(self.url)
        logger.info(f"Response status code: {response.status_code}")

2. Run with easypy:

from pyats.easypy import run

def main():
    run(
        testscript="test.py",
        taskid="Simple_Request_Test"
    )

Error output

Python crashes with a cryptic error, Stopping Context.
However, mac OS produces a crash report with the following details

Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes:       KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000110
Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000110
Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 11 Segmentation fault: 11
Terminating Process:   exc handler [PROCESS_ID]
Application Specific Information:
*** multi-threaded process forked ***
crashed on child side of fork pre-exec

[geortich]

Although documentation says that python 3.10.x is the latest supported for 24.10 this https://developer.cisco.com/docs/pyats/24-2/ says that support for 3.12.x has been added in 24.2.

[sowmyadn010501]

Hi, Kindly give me some time to check on this issue

[geortich]

thanks @sowmyadn010501. Let me know if you need any other logs from my end.

[sowmyadn010501]

Hello geortich,
We have found the workaround, that is to disable network proxy lookups by defining the environment variable 'no_proxy' with value '*', for example os.environ ['no_proxy'] = '*'. For more info please check this attached case python/cpython#74570. Kindly let us know if it helps meanwhile we will also check on how we can get it done by default using pyats.
Thanks.

[geortich]

Hi @sowmyadn010501 ,
Thank you very much for the workaround. This approach works with python 3.11.5 (I haven't tested other versions in the 3.11 branch) but not with 3.12.5 or 3.12.7.

I hope this gets resolved natively in a future pyATS release.