Re: mark_object crash in 22.1 and latest CVS (as of tonight)

[Kalman Reti]

On Nov 13, 2007 3:03 PM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>     > I'll have to wait till I'm next at work to find out exactly which slot
>     > in the buffer
>     > this list comes from using gdb.
>
>     Sounds like the contents of the buffer-undo-list.  Especially since this
>     variable is GC'd specially and getting it right is tricky.
>
> It should be easy to verify that guess by examining the undo list slot
> in the buffer object.
>

By moving up the stack in gdb at the time of the abort, I was able to see
that the top-level mark_object call is from the undo list processing
in Fgarbage_collect.

The undo list is for the *Shell Command Output* buffer, and is very long
since that buffer gets used over and over again for the many shell commands
the elisp code issues.

Looking harder at the code, I'm convinced that the undo_list should come before
the name entry in the buffer structure, so I moved it there.  However,
I still get
the crash.

My first experiment of putting a proceeding breakpoint in the
undo_list processing
which printed out the list failed to result in an obvious correlation
between elements
of the undo_list the last time it was processed and the time which
resulted in the
abort. I suspect that the Lisp_Misc_Free cells were markers which
should have been
removed but for some as yet unknown reason, weren't.  I'll have to
craft a more thorough
experiment next time.

Anyone know what the elements of the undo_list mean?  Some are conses
with a marker
in their CAR and a number in their CDR, some are just conses of two
numbers and some
are conses of a string and a number.