Re: Emacs hangs on Mac OS X

[YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu]

>>>>> On Wed, 03 Jan 2007 11:47:29 +0100, Piet van Oostrum <address@hidden> 
>>>>> said:

> With Emacs.app compiled from the pretest tarball (downloaded Dec 19) I get
> a hang fairly often. I can't remember that I had these with the previous
> version (from a CVS checkout), or at least much less often. Now I get them
> about once a day. I have grabbed a stack trace with gdb:

(snip)
> #10 0x001387a4 in alarm_signal_handler (signo=0) at atimer.c:397
> #11 <signal handler called>
> #12 0x9000437c in szone_malloc ()
> #13 0x00000000 in ?? ()

Unfortunately, the information about the interrupted library function
call seems to be already broken somehow.  Could you try to get
backtraces for a few instances of the hang?  Hopefully we will get
more detailed information.

> I think something should be done to prevent mallocs (and probably also
> frees) to be interrupted by the alarm signal.

That's what BLOCK_INPUT is for (see src/blockinput.h).

> Or maybe doing the event loop in a signal handler is not such a good
> idea.

SYNC_INPUT will obviate such calls, but it will not be set by default
until the next release.

> Another possibility would be to run the event loop in a different thread
> and let it put all events in a synchronized queue, where it can be popped
> by read_avail_input.

For this approach, maybe you want to look at Steven Tamm's "Jaguar
Carbon Event Patch":
http://homepage.mac.com/steventamm/software/jagemacs.html

                                     YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
                                address@hidden