RE: Crash under low memory

["Harold Hunt" <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

Stuart,

> I've just been playing with some samples in java on my Win2k laptop.
> XFree86 with a couple of rvxt's open was running in the background.
>
> The java process ate up all the memory on the machine and I got the
> windows "You system is running low on memory" dialog box appearing.
> After short while after I cleared that, both XFree86 and the rvxt's
> in it core dumped.

I've never seen this problem myself, but I don't doubt that it could occur.

There could very well be a mistake in the handling of an out-of-memory
condition in the Cygwin portion of XFree86 (hw/xwin).  However, XFree86 as a
whole might have been written from the standpoint that if the main graphics
app runs out of memory then the whole system is going down anyway.  In other
words, you'll find out from your debug whether or not the crash is in a
portion of the code that we have any control over.  It could be that the
crash could occur in several places that we aren't responsible for so it may
become too daunting of a task to fix.

I think its definitely worth looking into to at least find out where the
crash occurs.  Let me know when you find out.

> The XWin.exe.stackdump file gives ...
>
> Stack trace:

I may seem like I know my stuff about programming, but I've never bother to
learn stack dump voodoo.  I'll add that to my list of things to look into
someday.  :)

Harold