Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 09:51:21 -0400 From: Christopher Faylor To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: workaround for fork problems? Message-ID: <20050928135121.GA13988@trixie.casa.cgf.cx> Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.8i Corinna and I have been looking into the reported problems with fork ("file not found", "died waiting for longjmp", and others) for a while now but have been unable to come up with a cygwin-specific solution. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to have a fix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824422 This suggests that, if you have problems running an application, you should increase some system heap settings. Using the instructions in this article, I bumped up the settings of all of the heaps, and I no longer have any problems running a contrived test case which tickled the problem. While I'd prefer a solution which I could apply to cygwin and which would affect everyone, I think I'm ready to admit defeat on this one and just release 1.5.19 as-is. FWIW, the reported fork problem doesn't seem to be a regression from 1.5.18. So, anyway, if you are having fork problems you might want to give the above a try. It should go without saying that you really have to BE CAREFUL when making the suggested modifications to your registry since tinkering with this stuff could make your system completely inoperable. I can't suggest any "good" parameters for the heap values since it seems that the requirements vary depending on what you're running on your system. In my case, I quadrupled the size of all of the parameters but that's probably major overkill for this problem. Probably just adding 512 to each parameter would be adequate. cgf -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/