Re: Removal of unexec support from glibc malloc

[Florian Weimer]

On 01/23/2016 11:52 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:

[realloc/free of a dumped heap object]

> It may be a pain to fix them if they happen inside libraries.

I think the dump-and-reload cycle resets global variables defined in
libraries as long as they are not referenced by the main program.  This
means libraries have difficulties to retain references to objects
allocated before the dump.

If Emacs retains such references and passes them to a library, such
boundary-crossing heap operations could still happen.  But some
libraries will get very confused if they are handed an object while
their internal state says they have not created any objects yet.  (Which
is how we got __malloc_get_state and __malloc_set_state, I assume.)

Has it already happened that an innocent-looking library change causes
existing Emacs binaries to break?  Apart from when glibc tried to fix
the incorrect object alignment on 32-bit PowerPC?

Florian