Re: Ediff frequently crashes emacs.

[Kim F. Storm]

Hi Peter -- have you seens any more crashes with at extra checks enabled?


BTW, I still wonder if the following observation could explain the
crashes -- perhaps depending on which version of libc is used
(supposing different versions may experience this problem/bug to a
lesser or bigger extent).

> Notably it crashed in various libc functions (setlocale, tzset)
> because they didn't seem to obey the malloc_hook and free_hook in a
> consistent manner, i.e. some data would be malloc'ed via the hook, but
> free'd without the hook--at least I saw the same piece of memory being
> malloc'ed twice by setlocale with no call to the free hook in-between.
>
> Perhaps, the crashes could be related to such errors in other libc
> functions, calling malloc/free without going through the hooks to
> properly use emacs_blocked_malloc and emacs_blocked_free.
>
> I think that could mess up the heap.
>
> If we could find other functions which did something like that,
> we could try to protect them with BLOCK_INPUT...  (sigh).


Also, can anyone explain why the call to free(malloc_state_ptr) crashes
when I enable XMALLOC_OVERRUN_CHECK ?

> BTW, when XMALLOC_OVERRUN_CHECK is defined, the call to
> free(malloc_state_ptr) in malloc_initialize_hook causes a
> consistent trap (in _int_free) when the dumped emacs was started.
> As a quick hack, I just disabled that specific free in this case.


-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk