Need help with serious memory gremlins

[Matthew M. Burke]

I'm either missing something obvious, or this is out of my league.

I have inherited some 20,000 lines of Swarm code to which I am supposed
to add some new agents, make improvements, etc.  I am working with Swarm
1.0.5
and am developing under RedHat Linux 5.0 using gcc 2.7.2.3.

I am making very little progress because I keep getting segmentation
faults.
I have tried a number of different approaches and have been trying very
simple steps.  Below I have attached a stack trace from a run under gdb.
All these core dumps seem to be caused by malloc.

After banging my head agains the wall for quite some time, something
shook
loose and it occured to me to try running my code on a solaris machine I
have access to.  It runs fine, does exactly what I want, and doesn't
dump
core.

I anxiously await your comments,

Matt

P.S. Here's the stack trace.  I get very similar results from a number
of 
different fiddling around attempts.  In particular, at one point I had
merely
added a variable of type id to an interface, set it to NULL in the
class's
createBegin method and was still getting core dumps!

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x4010b8dd in chunk_alloc () at malloc.c:2680
malloc.c:2680: No such file or directory.
(gdb) where
#0  0x4010b8dd in chunk_alloc () at malloc.c:2680
#1  0x4010b295 in malloc () at malloc.c:2349
#2  0x81526f4 in __objc_xmalloc ()
#3  0x814bb69 in sarray_at_put ()
#4  0x814bbfa in sarray_at_put_safe ()
#5  0x814caa6 in __objc_install_dispatch_table_for_class ()
#6  0x814c790 in __objc_init_install_dtable ()
#7  0x809ddda in _c_CreateDrop_s__create_ (self=0x81983cc,
_cmd=0x819bda4, 
        aZone=0x8228b80) at Create.m:28
#8  0x80595c4 in _i_Ship__handle_CFF_Msg_ (self=0x8266200,
_cmd=0x8199ab0, 
        msg=0x8299990) at Ship.m:191
#9  0x80525bf in _i_ECOC__handle_CFF_Msg_ (self=0x8266200,
_cmd=0x8299bd8,         
        msg=0x8299990) at ECOC.m:109
#10 0x809c43c in _i_Object_s__perform_with_ (self=0x8266200,
_cmd=0x819cef0, 
        aSel=0x8299bd8, anObject1=0x8299990) at DefObject.m:479
#11 0x805bfab in _i_CoreAgent__handleMessage_ (self=0x8266200,
_cmd=0x819cdf8, 
        msg=0x8299990) at CoreAgent.m:1058
#12 0x805b9a0 in _i_CoreAgent__handleMessageSpool (self=0x8266200,
_cmd=0x8199a88)
        at CoreAgent.m:995
#13 0x8052a6e in _i_ECOC__handleMessageSpool (self=0x8266200,
_cmd=0x819c8e8) at 
        ECOC.m:70
#14 0x805d361 in _i_CoreAgent__assess (self=0x8266200, _cmd=0x819c928) 
        at CoreAgent.m:367
#15 0x805d444 in _i_CoreAgent__step (self=0x8266200, _cmd=0x819bc64) at
CoreAgent.m:390
#16 0x8059c6b in _i_Ship__step (self=0x8266200, _cmd=0x8199b08) at
Ship.m:85
#17 0x8052d25 in _i_ECOC__step (self=0x8266200, _cmd=0x819d334) at
ECOC.m:257
#18 0x809c3dd in _i_Object_s__perform_ (self=0x8266200, _cmd=0x81ac2bc,
aSel=0x819d334)
    at DefObject.m:469
#19 0x8088565 in _i_ActionTo_0___performAction__ (self=0x8297ee0,
_cmd=0x81ac5ac, 
        anActivity=0x8298838) at Action.m:208
#20 0x80888b0 in _i_Activity_c___run_ (self=0x8298838, _cmd=0x81ac594) 
        at XActivity.m:162
#21 0x8088806 in _i_Activity_c___run_ (self=0x8298cc0, _cmd=0x81ac594) 
        at XActivity.m:133
#22 0x8088806 in _i_Activity_c___run_ (self=0x8297460, _cmd=0x81ac594) 
        at XActivity.m:133
#23 0x8088806 in _i_Activity_c___run_ (self=0x8297270, _cmd=0x81ac594) 
        at XActivity.m:133
#24 0x8088806 in _i_Activity_c___run_ (self=0x8298c30, _cmd=0x81ac594) 
        at XActivity.m:133
#25 0x8088806 in _i_Activity_c___run_ (self=0x8296bf8, _cmd=0x81ac594) 
        at XActivity.m:133
#26 0x8088806 in _i_Activity_c___run_ (self=0x8296160, _cmd=0x81ac57c) 
        at XActivity.m:133
#27 0x8088e8e in _i_Activity_c__run (self=0x8296160, _cmd=0x819ecfc) at
XActivity.m:72
#28 0x8068e56 in _i_BatchSwarm__go (self=0x8227e28, _cmd=0x819eda8) at
BatchSwarm.m:116
#29 0x80690be in main (argc=3, argv=0xbffff924) at main.m:100
(gdb)

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