emacs and large-address awareness under recent snapshots

Ken Brown kbrown@cornell.edu
Mon Aug 8 16:05:00 GMT 2011


On 8/8/2011 11:50 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Aug  8 09:22, Ken Brown wrote:
>> I attached gdb to the running process and got some more information.
>> It turns out that this has nothing to do with X.  It's just that
>> starting emacs under X causes emacs to try to allocate memory, and
>> this makes the problem show up very quickly.
>>
>> It looks to me like emacs gets stuck in morecore_nolock() and/or
>> _malloc_internal_nolock(), which are defined in src/gmalloc.c.
>> Apparently, emacs has a peculiar way of managing memory on Cygwin,
>> and this chokes on the changes to the heap start address as of
>> 2011-07-21. I don't know enough programming to fix this.  If anyone
>> wants to try, the relevant source files to look at are gmalloc.c,
>> sheap.c, and unexcw.c.  The second and third are compiled only in
>> the Cygwin build, and the first also has some Cygwin-specific stuff.
>>
>> Maybe I should take this to the emacs-devel list at some point, but
>> I'll wait a while to see if someone on this list can help.
>
> I had a look into the sources you're mentioning above, but I don't see
> anything suspicious, apart from the fact that emacs uses some static
> buffer of 12 Megs as heap on Cygwin... sometimes.  At least that's what
> sheap.c is about, afaics.

I'll build a debug version and try stepping through the functions I 
mentioned.  Maybe I can figure out what's happening.  I suspect that it 
does have something to do with the static heap.

Ken

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