From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Possible memory corruption problem
Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:13:45 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <u7j885mhi.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <m24q3ca49q.fsf@ordesa.cs.uu.nl> (message from Piet van Oostrum on Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:36:01 +0100)
> From: Piet van Oostrum <piet@cs.uu.nl>
> Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:36:01 +0100
>
> I have had a few occasions when my mailboxes got corrupted.
> I read my normal email with VM, and mail from mailing lists with gnus. I
> have CVS emacs compiled about a month ago, running on Mac OS X 10.4.4.
>
> A few cases now, the last of which was last weekend, the mailboxes that I
> had open got completely mixed up. I lost my INBOX (primary VM mailbox)
> completely last night, and some of its messages where found in the middle
> of another mailbox that I had open. The mixup also occurred around last
> Christmas with VM and gnus mailboxes mixed up. Sometimes the corrupted
> mailboxes appeared to contain garbage text from other files.
Sounds like some snafu with relocating buffers. See below.
> I have tried to find the common circumstances when this happens and it
> aeems to me that it happens when the machine is low on virtual memory
> (including swap space).
Emacs should display a warning when the system is low on memory. Does
it?
> So I suspect that some part of Emacs' buffer and memory management
> fails to check the result of malloc calls or something similar.
I'd rather suspect something else: that some library function on your
platform is passed a pointer to buffer text, and that library function
calls malloc internally, which (especially when Emacs needs to
allocate a large amount of memory) causes Emacs to relocate buffer
text, which could easily invalidate the pointer(s) used by that
library function.
> I have written a test program and it appears that Mac OS X's malloc
> and realloc correctly return NULL when the process runs out of
> memory.
Does Emacs indeed use system malloc on your platform? Or does it use
gmalloc?
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2006-02-06 19:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2006-02-06 15:36 Possible memory corruption problem Piet van Oostrum
2006-02-06 19:13 ` Eli Zaretskii [this message]
2006-02-06 22:14 ` Piet van Oostrum
2006-02-13 4:40 ` Richard M. Stallman
2006-02-14 4:35 ` Eli Zaretskii
2006-02-14 7:56 ` Piet van Oostrum
2006-02-14 9:29 ` Aidan Kehoe
2006-02-15 4:39 ` Richard M. Stallman
2006-02-16 13:21 ` Piet van Oostrum
2006-02-20 18:42 ` Richard M. Stallman
2006-02-14 22:17 ` Richard M. Stallman
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