Segmentation fault of GNU Emacs 21.3.1

Segmentation fault of GNU Emacs 21.3.1

[Jochen Luebbers]

Hi all,

today is one of the unlucky ones: My Emacs crashed! I'd never had such
behaviour before, Emacs kept always out of mischief, but with this
Emacs I sometimes - rarely - get a crash. :-(

It's the Emacs on my office PC installed from a
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 4 WS:

,------------------------------------------------------------------------
| [luebbersj@scs-66 ~]$ emacs --version
| GNU Emacs 21.3.1
| Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
| GNU Emacs comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
| You may redistribute copies of Emacs
| under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
| For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.
`------------------------------------------------------------------------

The back trace does not look very good to me...

,------------------------------------------------------------------------
| [luebbersj@scs-66 ~]$ gdb /usr/bin/emacs core.7662 
| GNU gdb Red Hat Linux (6.3.0.0-1.132.EL4rh)
| Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
| GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
| welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
| Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
| There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
| This GDB was configured as "i386-redhat-linux-gnu"...
| (no debugging symbols found)
| Using host libthread_db library "/lib/tls/libthread_db.so.1".
| 
| Core was generated by `emacs -l /home/luebbersj/.CSemacs -geometry +515+439'.
| Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
| [Reading/Loading...]
| #0  0x08140dab in error ()
| (gdb) bt
| #0  0x08140dab in error ()
| #1  0x1828942c in ?? ()
| #2  0x1828942c in ?? ()
| #3  0x1828942c in ?? ()
| #4  0xbff5080c in ?? ()
| #5  0x1828942c in ?? ()
| #6  0x382c325c in ?? ()
| #7  0x182a0e34 in ?? ()
| #8  0x00000001 in ?? ()
| #9  0x00000000 in ?? ()
`------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is there any change to get more information out off this core dump or in
future without using a debug version of emacs by installing the sources
compiling with debug flags?

Is this eventually a well known bug in emacs 21.3?


Regards
    Jochen.
-- 
  "Who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security
   will loose both in the end."                   (Benjamin Franklin)

Re: Segmentation fault of GNU Emacs 21.3.1

[Richard Stallman]

I suggest you upgrade to Emacs 22.1.
To get useful info in GDB, compile with CFLAGS="-g -Oo -fno-cross-jump".