Skip to content

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn't Ctrl-C interrupt a running tortuosity_fd call?

Poromics sets PYTHON_JULIACALL_HANDLE_SIGNALS=yes before importing juliacall. This hands SIGINT, SIGSEGV, and SIGBUS off to Julia's signal handlers so the runtime can recover from faults raised inside JIT-compiled code or a GPU backend (on Darwin/arm64 this is what prevents the ~60% SIGBUS rate during first-call Metal init — see #20).

The tradeoff is that Python's own SIGINT handler does not run while Julia owns the thread, so pressing Ctrl-C during a tortuosity_fd solve won't raise KeyboardInterrupt. Use one of these instead:

  • Let the solve finish — FDM runs typically return in seconds.
  • Stop the whole Python process (Ctrl-\, or kill from another terminal).

  • If you need Python-native signal handling (e.g. running in a long-lived notebook and you want a clean interrupt), override the default before importing poromics:

    import os
os.environ["PYTHON_JULIACALL_HANDLE_SIGNALS"] = "no"
import poromics  # noqa: E402

    With handle-signals=no you regain Ctrl-C, but first-call Metal GPU initialization becomes unreliable on Darwin/arm64. This is a juliacall-wide limitation, not specific to Poromics.

The LBM solvers (tortuosity_lbm, permeability_lbm) are Python-driven and honor Ctrl-C as usual.