When short on memory, dolfin.FunctionSpace crashes with segmentation fault instead of raising MemoryError

[jakub.mateusz.kowalski]

The failing example (at system with 62GB RAM) is:

>>> import dolfin
>>> print(dolfin.__version__)
2018.1.0
>>> from dolfin import Mesh, FunctionSpace
>>> mesh = Mesh('eighth_of_sphere_finer.xml')
>>> V = FunctionSpace(mesh, "CG", 3)
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I blame the memory shortage, as the issue does not affect more coarse versions of the mesh nor lower degrees.

I am unable to reproduce this error with UnitCubeMesh The mesh I have used is available at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RkSyNnBIaaS6aTur_lAZfVOvN5JWuXCG

The FEniCS has been run with Docker:

docker run -ti --env HOST_UID=$(id -u) --env HOST_GID=$(id -g) -v $(pwd):/home/fenics/shared:Z quay.io/fenicsproject/stable
cd /home/fenics/shared/

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