vfork problems on Win98 -- is there a fix?

Christopher Faylor cygwin@cygwin.com
Sun Sep 9 09:46:00 GMT 2001


On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 11:23:01PM -0700, Andrew Kalman wrote:
>Hi Christopher.
>
>Re:
>>If this is important to you then you could build debugging versions of
>>make and the cygwin DLL and figure out where the memory was being
>>consumed.  Trying to track down where memory leaks occur is always very
>>tricky but maybe you could put some checks in cygwin's fork and
>>spawn_guts routines as a first step.
>
>Unfortunately, this sort of thing is _way_ beyond my abilities.  I
>don't know the first thing about Unix programming.
>
>But I'm puzzled -- if this is a bona fide leak in the Cygwin stuff,
>then why isn't there a major effort to eliminate it?  I don't think
>what I'm using the Cygwin bash shell for is all that out of the
>ordinary ...

Why did I just *know* that this answer was coming?  Well, I haven't been
completely unsuccesful in suggesting this.  Occasionally people are
willing to take up the bat and give it a try.

Perhaps someone will be willing to explain to you how open source
projects, manned by voluneers work.

The bottom line, cruel as it sounds is "I don't feel like it." This is
not an issue for the way that Red Hat uses cygwin so it is not part of
my official job.  And, I try to pick things to work on that either
really interest me or will cause a substantial improvement in cygwin for
a number of people.  This is what I did for the upcoming 1.3.3 release.
Since there are other projects that interest me more than ensuring that
long running recursive makes on Windows 98 which use non-cygwin
applications do not *potentially* leak memory and there are other issues
which will probably benefit more users, I do not choose to work on this
problem.

However, as usual, if someone else wants to look into this, I'm
certainly willing to advise.

cgf

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