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Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 18:25:56 +0200
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: emacs and large-address awareness under recent snapshots
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On Aug  8 12:05, Ken Brown wrote:
> 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.

Maybe, but the static heap is in the bss segment, so it's not in the
application heap starting at 0x80000000, but somewhere within the .bss
section's address range from 0x746000 to 0x1380000.

There's also this strange comment at the top of sheap.c:

   simulate `sbrk' with an array in .bss, for `unexec' support for Cygwin;
   complete rewrite of xemacs Cygwin `unexec' code

Whatever "unexec" is.  The code is from 2004.  I'm concerned that it
still tries to workaround some old problem in the Cygwin sbrk
implementation in Cygwin 1.5.  Unfortunately the comment doesn't contain
any hint as to what exact problem this code is trying to workaround.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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