Re: build fails on alphaev67-dec-osf5.1

[Stefan Monnier]

> Dumping temacs fails with a segv, apparently due to recursive calls of
> memory_full.  It appears to be triggered by lisp_malloc called from
> init_symbol, but gdb on this system isn't reliable and I have trouble
> with dbx.  I also don't have time to look at it any further for a
> while.  In the absence of tru64 (osf), perhaps someone has access to
> GNU on alpha or other 64-bit little-endian system.

Can someone investigate this ?  It is probably related to some
change of mine to alloc.c, so figuring out which change introduced the
problem is a first step, then debugging with GDB (or printfs if GDB is
unreliable).
Also can you show us a copy of src/config.h to see what code
of alloc.c gets compiled ?

> I assume this is caused by the many recent changes in alloc.c.  What
> are they for, and why not work on the Boehm GC instead?

They are intended to get rid of the markbit so as to reduce the
number of bits eaten by tags from 4 to 3 so that they can then
be moved from the top 4 bits to the bottom 3 bits (which are always
0 on 64bit systems and almost always 0 on 32bit systems).

IIUC this is mostly orthogonal to the use of something like the Boehm GC.
I personally don't know enough about the Boehm GC to know what benefit
it could provide.


        Stefan