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Re: emacs and large-address awareness under recent snapshots


On 8/9/2011 10:12 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
On 8/9/2011 7:19 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
(gdb) thread 1
[Switching to thread 1 (Thread 19828.0x447c)]
#0  0x00622ee0 in morecore_nolock (size=1052672) at gmalloc.c:703
703           while ((__malloc_size_t) BLOCK ((char *) result + size)>
newsize);
(gdb) p /x size
$1 = 0x101000
(gdb) p /x heapsize
$2 = 0x80000
(gdb) p result
$3 = (void *) 0x807d0000
(gdb) p newsize
$4 = 0
(gdb) p _heapbase
$5 = 0x816000 "\202"
(gdb) p _heapinfo
$6 = (malloc_info *) 0x80060000

Is _heapbase the problem?  This is initialized to _heapinfo at the first
call of malloc and is never changed.  _heapinfo presumably points into
the static heap at that point.  (_heapinfo is later changed as a result
of realloc.)  This low value of _heapbase is used in the BLOCK macro.

Here's what I think is happening. When temacs.exe is running during the build process (see my explanation of this earlier in the thread), malloc_init is called and _heapbase is set. At this point, temacs is using its own static buffer as the heap, and _heapbase gets the value 0x816000. This gets dumped as initialized data into emacs.exe, as does the value __malloc_initialized = 1. Now when emacs.exe is run, it sees that malloc has already been initialized, so _heapbase retains its value, which is no longer appropriate. All code relying on the BLOCK macro is now invalid.

AFAICS, this has always been wrong.  But the error didn't have dramatic
consequences until the heap was put into high memory.

I'm not sure what's the best way to fix this (assuming my analysis is
right).  Would it be enough to set __malloc_initialized to 0 before
dumping?  That would force emacs to reinitialize and get the correct
value of _heapbase.

No, that's too simple-minded. I just tried it, and emacs aborted. This seems like a mess.


Ken

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