Re: GC crashes

[Nick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz>]

 > > Then maybe someone should build it to use the standard malloc/free
 > > routines and try?  (Yes, yes I should do it myself instead of bogging
 > > everybody else, but I don't have that much CPU time and I have not seen
 > > the infamous memory corruption yet, so I'm not that curious.)
 > 
 > I just tried that, but it failed in the same way.

I recently asked on the Valgrind mailing list about this very matter. This
is what Julian Seward, the author of Valgrind said:

JS> I"ve had varying success running GNU emacs on recent V"s; one time
JS> it worked, but another time it didn"t.  I think it is to do with
JS> emacs doing something wildly non-portable with brk() and being
JS> confused by V"s behaviour.  xemacs doesn"t have any such stupidness.

XEmacs doesn't seem to work with Valgrind, but assuming it dumps the
executable in the same way, thats not surprising.

JS> "build it using the standard malloc/free routines" is just a ./configure
JS> option to emacs, IIRC.  Something like --use-system-malloc -- you"ll have
JS> to check, I don"t really remember.  Note I also have to use 
JS> --with-x-toolkit=NONE in order to get a build of emacs which doesn"t
JS> simply segfault at startup.

I tried building Emacs with -DSYSTEM_MALLOC, --with-x-toolkit=no, and even
--without-x (but not all combinations) to no avail.

I feel the code that causes a problem is probably in unexec.c, or possibly
emacs.c but this is just a guess and not a very educated one at that.

Nick