bug#61896: 30.0.50; Emacs crashes because of an invalid free

[Rah Guzar via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

I encountered something very similar today after updating emacs.
In my case the crash was caused by trying to read an email from mu4e,
which I have installed as a systems package.

Like you I could everything worked fine with `emacs -Q`. After adding,
mu4e to the load path, I could load it and read messages successfully.
But with my own configuration it crashed even after removing all mu4e
related settings from my config. Emacs crashed and I could see the
following on the terminal I launched it from

free(): invalid pointer
Fatal error 6: Aborted

along with a backtrace.

After finding this thread, I copied the mu4e lisp files to a directory
writable by me and byte compiled those. Adding this directory to load-path
has fixed my problem.

I think the distro provided elc files were compiled by Emacs 28
and I am using a build of emacs 29 and some incompatible change
recently caused this problem.

For now, my fix works but is there a good way to deal with possibly
incompatible bytecode in site-lisp directory?

Rah Guzar

Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

> Emacs just crashes out of nowhere, e.g. after I open a my init file.
>
> I have had this device for a while on a device of mine, that I couldn't
> reproduce on my main workstation or using emacs -Q.  Apparently this
> could be related to some faulty byte-code.
>
> The best I could do to detect this issue was to build Emacs using
> -fsanitize=address and I managed to reprodce the issue reliably by
> invoking package-recompile-all.  I collected the following log:
>
>
>
> I ran the same command in batch mode, and now the issue appears to be
> fixed.  This gives me no reassurance, as a few days ago the I had
> temporary managed to acchive the same state and then Emacs crashed again
> after rebuilding again.
>
> In GNU Emacs 30.0.50 (build 4, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version
>  3.24.36, cairo version 1.16.0) of 2023-03-01 built on quetzal
> Repository revision: 4b99015e15a23bd5cbec021d53ef9fcca25b2441
> Repository branch: master
> System Description: Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid
>
> Configured using:
>  'configure --with-pgtk 'CFLAGS=-O0 -ggdb3 -fsanitize=address''
>
> Configured features:
> ACL CAIRO DBUS FREETYPE GIF GLIB GMP GNUTLS GPM GSETTINGS HARFBUZZ JPEG
> JSON LCMS2 LIBOTF LIBSELINUX LIBSYSTEMD LIBXML2 MODULES NOTIFY INOTIFY
> PDUMPER PGTK PNG RSVG SECCOMP SOUND SQLITE3 THREADS TIFF
> TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS TREE_SITTER WEBP XIM GTK3 ZLIB
>
> Important settings:
>   value of $LC_MONETARY: en_US.UTF-8
>   value of $LC_NUMERIC: en_US.UTF-8
>   value of $LC_TIME: en_US.UTF-8
>   value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8
>   value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=ibus
>   locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix
>
> Major mode: ELisp/l
>
> Minor modes in effect:
>   tooltip-mode: t
>   global-eldoc-mode: t
>   eldoc-mode: t
>   show-paren-mode: t
>   electric-indent-mode: t
>   mouse-wheel-mode: t
>   tool-bar-mode: t
>   menu-bar-mode: t
>   file-name-shadow-mode: t
>   global-font-lock-mode: t
>   font-lock-mode: t
>   blink-cursor-mode: t
>   line-number-mode: t
>   transient-mark-mode: t
>   auto-composition-mode: t
>   auto-encryption-mode: t
>   auto-compression-mode: t
>
> Load-path shadows:
> None found.
>
> Features:
> (shadow sort emacsbug mail-extr message mailcap yank-media puny dired
> dired-loaddefs rfc822 mml mml-sec password-cache epa derived epg rfc6068
> epg-config gnus-util text-property-search time-date subr-x mm-decode
> mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader
> sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils
> cus-edit pp cus-start cus-load icons wid-edit misearch multi-isearch
> vc-git diff-mode easy-mmode vc-dispatcher cl-loaddefs cl-lib rmc
> iso-transl tooltip cconv eldoc paren electric uniquify ediff-hook
> vc-hooks lisp-float-type elisp-mode mwheel term/pgtk-win pgtk-win
> term/common-win pgtk-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe
> tabulated-list replace newcomment text-mode lisp-mode prog-mode register
> page tab-bar menu-bar rfn-eshadow isearch easymenu timer select
> scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax font-core term/tty-colors
> frame minibuffer nadvice seq simple cl-generic indonesian philippine
> cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao
> korean japanese eucjp-ms cp51932 hebrew greek romanian slovak czech
> european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese composite emoji-zwj charscript
> charprop case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help abbrev obarray oclosure
> cl-preloaded button loaddefs theme-loaddefs faces cus-face macroexp
> files window text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env
> code-pages mule custom widget keymap hashtable-print-readable backquote
> threads dbusbind inotify dynamic-setting system-font-setting
> font-render-setting cairo gtk pgtk lcms2 multi-tty make-network-process
> emacs)
>
> Memory information:
> ((conses 16 65648 11383)
>  (symbols 48 7380 0)
>  (strings 32 19680 1617)
>  (string-bytes 1 540967)
>  (vectors 16 12795)
>  (vector-slots 8 182734 13738)
>  (floats 8 32 68)
>  (intervals 56 625 8)
>  (buffers 984 13))