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[Emacs-diffs] Changes to emacs/gc/doc/README.changes [Boehm-versions]


From: Dave Love
Subject: [Emacs-diffs] Changes to emacs/gc/doc/README.changes [Boehm-versions]
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 11:19:56 -0400

Index: emacs/gc/doc/README.changes
diff -c /dev/null emacs/gc/doc/README.changes:1.2.2.1.2.1
*** /dev/null   Mon Jun 16 11:19:56 2003
--- emacs/gc/doc/README.changes Mon Jun 16 11:19:53 2003
***************
*** 0 ****
--- 1,1894 ----
+ This is a rough history of garbage collector bugs and versions.
+ 
+ This has been maintained with varying diligence over the years.
+ 
+ I made an attempt to include recent contributors here.  I apologize for any
+ omissions.
+ 
+ -------------------------
+ 
+   Version 1.3 and immediately preceding versions contained spurious
+ assembly language assignments to TMP_SP.  Only the assignment in the PC/RT
+ code is necessary.  On other machines, with certain compiler options,
+ the assignments can lead to an unsaved register being overwritten.
+ Known to cause problems under SunOS 3.5 WITHOUT the -O option.  (With
+ -O the compiler recognizes it as dead code.  It probably shouldn't,
+ but that's another story.)
+ 
+   Version 1.4 and earlier versions used compile time determined values
+ for the stack base.  This no longer works on Sun 3s, since Sun 3/80s use
+ a different stack base.  We now use a straightforward heuristic on all
+ machines on which it is known to work (incl. Sun 3s) and compile-time
+ determined values for the rest.  There should really be library calls
+ to determine such values.
+ 
+   Version 1.5 and earlier did not ensure 8 byte alignment for objects
+ allocated on a sparc based machine.
+ 
+   Version 1.8 added ULTRIX support in gc_private.h.
+   
+   Version 1.9 fixed a major bug in gc_realloc.
+   
+   Version 2.0 introduced a consistent naming convention for collector
+ routines and added support for registering dynamic library data segments
+ in the standard mark_roots.c.  Most of the data structures were revamped.
+ The treatment of interior pointers was completely changed.  Finalization
+ was added.  Support for locking was added.  Object kinds were added.
+ We added a black listing facility to avoid allocating at addresses known
+ to occur as integers somewhere in the address space.  Much of this
+ was accomplished by adapting ideas and code from the PCR collector.
+ The test program was changed and expanded.
+ 
+   Version 2.1 was the first stable version since 1.9, and added support
+ for PPCR.
+ 
+   Version 2.2 added debugging allocation, and fixed various bugs.  Among them:
+ - GC_realloc could fail to extend the size of the object for certain large 
object sizes.
+ - A blatant subscript range error in GC_printf, which unfortunately
+   wasn't exercised on machines with sufficient stack alignment constraints.
+ - GC_register_displacement did the wrong thing if it was called after
+   any allocation had taken place.
+ - The leak finding code would eventually break after 2048 byte
+   byte objects leaked.
+ - interface.c didn't compile.
+ - The heap size remained much too small for large stacks.
+ - The stack clearing code behaved badly for large stacks, and perhaps
+   on HP/PA machines.
+ 
+   Version 2.3 added ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS and fixed the following bugs:
+ - Missing declaration of etext in the A/UX version.
+ - Some PCR root-finding problems.
+ - Blacklisting was not 100% effective, because the plausible future
+   heap bounds were being miscalculated.
+ - GC_realloc didn't handle out-of-memory correctly.
+ - GC_base could return a nonzero value for addresses inside free blocks.
+ - test.c wasn't really thread safe, and could erroneously report failure
+   in a multithreaded environment.  (The locking primitives need to be
+   replaced for other threads packages.)
+ - GC_CONS was thoroughly broken.
+ - On a SPARC with dynamic linking, signals stayed diabled while the
+   client code was running.
+   (Thanks to Manuel Serrano at INRIA for reporting the last two.)
+   
+   Version 2.4 added GC_free_space_divisor as a tuning knob, added
+   support for OS/2 and linux, and fixed the following bugs:
+ - On machines with unaligned pointers (e.g. Sun 3), every 128th word could
+   fail to be considered for marking.
+ - Dynamic_load.c erroneously added 4 bytes to the length of the data and
+   bss sections of the dynamic library.  This could result in a bad memory
+   reference if the actual length was a multiple of a page.  (Observed on
+   Sun 3.  Can probably also happen on a Sun 4.)
+   (Thanks to Robert Brazile for pointing out that the Sun 3 version
+   was broken.  Dynamic library handling is still broken on Sun 3s
+   under 4.1.1U1, but apparently not 4.1.1.  If you have such a machine,
+   use -Bstatic.)
+   
+   Version 2.5 fixed the following bugs:
+ - Removed an explicit call to exit(1)
+ - Fixed calls to GC_printf and GC_err_printf, so the correct number of
+   arguments are always supplied.  The OS/2 C compiler gets confused if
+   the number of actuals and the number of formals differ.  (ANSI C
+   doesn't require this to work.  The ANSI sanctioned way of doing things
+   causes too many compatibility problems.)
+   
+   Version 3.0  added generational/incremental collection and stubborn
+   objects.
+ 
+   Version 3.1 added the following features:
+ - A workaround for a SunOS 4.X SPARC C compiler
+   misfeature that caused problems when the collector was turned into
+   a dynamic library.  
+ - A fix for a bug in GC_base that could result in a memory fault.
+ - A fix for a performance bug (and several other misfeatures) pointed
+   out by Dave Detlefs and Al Dosser.
+ - Use of dirty bit information for static data under Solaris 2.X.
+ - DEC Alpha/OSF1 support (thanks to Al Dosser).
+ - Incremental collection on more platforms.
+ - A more refined heap expansion policy.  Less space usage by default.
+ - Various minor enhancements to reduce space usage, and to reduce
+   the amount of memory scanned by the collector.
+ - Uncollectable allocation without per object overhead.
+ - More conscientious handling of out-of-memory conditions.
+ - Fixed a bug in debugging stubborn allocation.
+ - Fixed a bug that resulted in occasional erroneous reporting of smashed
+   objects with debugging allocation.
+ - Fixed bogus leak reports of size 4096 blocks with FIND_LEAK.
+ 
+   Version 3.2 fixed a serious and not entirely repeatable bug in
+   the incremental collector.  It appeared only when dirty bit info
+   on the roots was available, which is normally only under Solaris.
+   It also added GC_general_register_disappearing_link, and some
+   testing code.  Interface.c disappeared.
+ 
+   Version 3.3 fixes several bugs and adds new ports:
+ - PCR-specific bugs.
+ - Missing locking in GC_free, redundant FASTUNLOCK
+   in GC_malloc_stubborn, and 2 bugs in
+   GC_unregister_disappearing_link.
+   All of the above were pointed out by Neil Sharman
+   (address@hidden).
+ - Common symbols allocated by the SunOS4.X dynamic loader
+   were not included in the root set.
+ - Bug in GC_finalize (reported by Brian Beuning and Al Dosser)
+ - Merged Amiga port from Jesper Peterson (untested)
+ - Merged NeXT port from Thomas Funke (significantly
+   modified and untested)
+ 
+   Version 3.4:
+ - Fixed a performance bug in GC_realloc.
+ - Updated the amiga port.
+ - Added NetBSD and 386BSD ports.
+ - Added cord library.
+ - Added trivial performance enhancement for
+   ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS.  (Don't scan last word.)
+   
+   Version 3.5
+ - Minor collections now mark from roots only once, if that
+   doesn't cause an excessive pause.
+ - The stack clearing heuristic was refined to prevent anomalies
+   with very heavily recursive programs and sparse stacks.
+ - Fixed a bug that prevented mark stack growth in some cases.
+   GC_objects_are_marked should be set to TRUE after a call
+   to GC_push_roots and as part of GC_push_marked, since
+   both can now set mark bits.  I think this is only a performance
+   bug, but I wouldn't bet on it.  It's certainly very hard to argue
+   that the old version was correct.
+ - Fixed an incremental collection bug that prevented it from
+   working at all when HBLKSIZE != getpagesize()
+ - Changed dynamic_loading.c to include gc_priv.h before testing
+   DYNAMIC_LOADING.  SunOS dynamic library scanning
+   must have been broken in 3.4.
+ - Object size rounding now adapts to program behavior.
+ - Added a workaround (provided by Manuel Serrano and
+   colleagues) to a long-standing SunOS 4.X (and 3.X?) ld bug
+   that I had incorrectly assumed to have been squished.
+   The collector was broken if the text segment size was within
+   32 bytes of a multiple of 8K bytes, and if the beginning of
+   the data segment contained interesting roots.  The workaround
+   assumes a demand-loadable executable.  The original may have
+   have "worked" in some other cases.
+ - Added dynamic library support under IRIX5.
+ - Added support for EMX under OS/2 (thanks to Ari Huttunen).
+   
+ Version 3.6:
+ - fixed a bug in the mark stack growth code that was introduced
+   in 3.4.
+ - fixed Makefile to work around DEC AXP compiler tail recursion
+   bug.
+ 
+ Version 3.7:
+ - Added a workaround for an HP/UX compiler bug.
+ - Fixed another stack clearing performance bug.  Reworked
+   that code once more.
+   
+ Version 4.0:
+ - Added support for Solaris threads (which was possible
+   only by reimplementing some fraction of Solaris threads,
+   since Sun doesn't currently make the thread debugging
+   interface available).
+ - Added non-threads win32 and win32S support.
+ - (Grudgingly, with suitable muttering of obscenities) renamed
+   files so that the collector distribution could live on a FAT
+   file system.  Files that are guaranteed to be useless on
+   a PC still have long names.  Gc_inline.h and gc_private.h
+   still exist, but now just include  gc_inl.h and gc_priv.h.
+ - Fixed a really obscure bug in finalization that could cause
+   undetected mark stack overflows.  (I would be surprised if
+   any real code ever tickled this one.)
+ - Changed finalization code to dynamically resize the hash
+   tables it maintains.  (This probably does not matter for well-
+   -written code.  It no doubt does for C++ code that overuses
+   destructors.)
+ - Added typed allocation primitives.  Rewrote the marker to
+   accommodate them with more reasonable efficiency.  This
+   change should also speed up marking for GC_malloc allocated
+   objects a little.  See gc_typed.h for new primitives.
+ - Improved debugging facilities slightly.  Allocation time
+   stack traces are now kept by default on SPARC/SUNOS4.
+   (Thanks to Scott Schwartz.)
+ - Added better support for small heap applications.
+ - Significantly extended cord package.  Fixed a bug in the
+   implementation of lazily read files.  Printf and friends now
+   have cord variants.  Cord traversals are a bit faster.
+ - Made ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS recognition the default.
+ - Fixed de so that it can run in constant space, independent
+   of file size.  Added simple string searching to cords and de.
+ - Added the Hull-Ellis C++ interface.
+ - Added dynamic library support for OSF/1.
+   (Thanks to Al Dosser and Tim Bingham at DEC.)
+ - Changed argument to GC_expand_hp to be expressed
+   in units of bytes instead of heap blocks.  (Necessary
+   since the heap block size now varies depending on
+   configuration.  The old version was never very clean.)
+ - Added GC_get_heap_size().  The previous "equivalent"
+   was broken.
+ - Restructured the Makefile a bit.  
+ 
+ Since version 4.0:
+ - Changed finalization implementation to guarantee that
+   finalization procedures are called outside of the allocation
+   lock, making direct use of the interface a little less dangerous.
+   MAY BREAK EXISTING CLIENTS that assume finalizers
+   are protected by a lock.  Since there seem to be few multithreaded
+   clients that use finalization, this is hopefully not much of
+   a problem.
+ - Fixed a gross bug in CORD_prev.
+ - Fixed a bug in blacklst.c that could result in unbounded
+   heap growth during startup on machines that do not clear
+   memory obtained from the OS (e.g. win32S).
+ - Ported de editor to win32/win32S.  (This is now the only
+   version with a mouse-sensitive UI.)
+ - Added GC_malloc_ignore_off_page to allocate large arrays
+   in the presence of ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS.
+ - Changed GC_call_with_alloc_lock to not disable signals in
+   the single-threaded case.
+ - Reduced retry count in GC_collect_or_expand for garbage
+   collecting when out of memory.
+ - Made uncollectable allocations bypass black-listing, as they
+   should.
+ - Fixed a bug in typed_test in test.c that could cause (legitimate)
+   GC crashes.
+ - Fixed some potential synchronization problems in finalize.c
+ - Fixed a real locking problem in typd_mlc.c.
+ - Worked around an AIX 3.2 compiler feature that results in
+   out of bounds memory references.
+ - Partially worked around an IRIX5.2 beta problem (which may
+   or may not persist to the final release).
+ - Fixed a bug in the heap integrity checking code that could
+   result in explicitly deallocated objects being identified as
+   smashed.  Fixed a bug in the dbg_mlc stack saving code
+   that caused old argument pointers to be considered live.
+ - Fixed a bug in CORD_ncmp (and hence CORD_str).
+ - Repaired the OS2 port, which had suffered from bit rot
+   in 4.0.  Worked around what appears to be CSet/2 V1.0
+   optimizer bug.
+ - Fixed a Makefile bug for target "c++".
+ 
+ Since version 4.1:
+ - Multiple bug fixes/workarounds in the Solaris threads version.
+   (It occasionally failed to locate some register contents for
+   marking.  It also turns out that thr_suspend and friends are
+   unreliable in Solaris 2.3.  Dirty bit reads appear
+   to be unreliable under some weird 
+   circumstances.  My stack marking code
+   contained a serious performance bug.  The new code is
+   extremely defensive, and has not failed in several cpu
+   hours of testing.  But  no guarantees ...)
+ - Added MacOS support (thanks to Patrick Beard.)
+ - Fixed several syntactic bugs in gc_c++.h and friends.  (These
+   didn't bother g++, but did bother most other compilers.)
+   Fixed gc_c++.h finalization interface.  (It didn't.)
+ - 64 bit alignment for allocated objects was not guaranteed in a
+   few cases in which it should have been.
+ - Added GC_malloc_atomic_ignore_off_page.
+ - Added GC_collect_a_little.
+ - Added some prototypes to gc.h.
+ - Some other minor bug fixes (notably in Makefile).
+ - Fixed OS/2 / EMX port (thanks to Ari Huttunen).
+ - Fixed AmigaDOS port. (thanks to Michel Schinz).
+ - Fixed the DATASTART definition under Solaris.  There
+   was a 1 in 16K chance of the collector missing the first
+   64K of static data (and thus crashing).
+ - Fixed some blatant anachronisms in the README file.
+ - Fixed PCR-Makefile for upcoming PPCR release.
+ 
+ Since version 4.2:
+ - Fixed SPARC alignment problem with GC_DEBUG.
+ - Fixed Solaris threads /proc workaround.  The real
+   problem was an interaction with mprotect.
+ - Incorporated fix from Patrick Beard for gc_c++.h (now gc_cpp.h).
+ - Slightly improved allocator space utilization by
+   fixing the GC_size_map mechanism.
+ - Integrated some Sony News and MIPS RISCos 4.51
+   patches.  (Thanks to Nobuyuki Hikichi of
+   Software Research Associates, Inc. Japan)
+ - Fixed HP_PA alignment problem.  (Thanks to
+   address@hidden)
+ - Added GC_same_obj and friends.  Changed GC_base
+   to return 0 for pointers past the end of large objects.
+   Improved GC_base performance with ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS
+   on machines with a slow integer mod operation.
+   Added GC_PTR_ADD, GC_PTR_STORE, etc. to prepare
+   for preprocessor.
+ - changed the default on most UNIX machines to be that
+   signals are not disabled during critical GC operations.
+   This is still ANSI-conforming, though somewhat dangerous
+   in the presence of signal handlers. But the performance
+   cost of the alternative is sometimes problematic.
+   Can be changed back with a minor Makefile edit.
+ - renamed IS_STRING in gc.h, to CORD_IS_STRING, thus
+   following my own naming convention.  Added the function
+   CORD_to_const_char_star.
+ - Fixed a gross bug in GC_finalize.  Symptom: occasional
+   address faults in that function.  (Thanks to Anselm
+   Baird-Smith (address@hidden)
+ - Added port to ICL DRS6000 running DRS/NX.  Restructured
+   things a bit to factor out common code, and remove obsolete
+   code.  Collector should now run under SUNOS5 with either
+   mprotect or /proc dirty bits.  (Thanks to Douglas Steel
+   (address@hidden)).
+ - More bug fixes and workarounds for Solaris 2.X.  (These were
+   mostly related to putting the collector in a dynamic library,
+   which didn't really work before.  Also SOLARIS_THREADS
+   didn't interact well with dl_open.)  Thanks to address@hidden
+ - Fixed a serious performance bug on the DEC Alpha.  The text
+   segment was getting registered as part of the root set.
+   (Amazingly, the result was still fast enough that the bug
+   was not conspicuous.) The fix works on OSF/1, version 1.3.
+   Hopefully it also works on other versions of OSF/1 ...
+ - Fixed a bug in GC_clear_roots.
+ - Fixed a bug in GC_generic_malloc_words_small that broke
+   gc_inl.h.  (Reported by Antoine de Maricourt.  I broke it
+   in trying to tweak the Mac port.) 
+ - Fixed some problems with cord/de under Linux.
+ - Fixed some cord problems, notably with CORD_riter4.
+ - Added DG/UX port.
+   Thanks to Ben A. Mesander (address@hidden)
+ - Added finalization registration routines with weaker ordering
+   constraints.  (This is necessary for C++ finalization with
+   multiple inheritance, since the compiler often adds self-cycles.)
+ - Filled the holes in the SCO port. (Thanks to Michael Arnoldus
+   <address@hidden>.)
+ - John Ellis' additions to the C++ support:  From John:
+ 
+ * I completely rewrote the documentation in the interface gc_c++.h
+ (later renamed gc_cpp.h).  I've tried to make it both clearer and more
+ precise.
+ 
+ * The definition of accessibility now ignores pointers from an
+ finalizable object (an object with a clean-up function) to itself.
+ This allows objects with virtual base classes to be finalizable by the
+ collector.  Compilers typically implement virtual base classes using
+ pointers from an object to itself, which under the old definition of
+ accessibility prevented objects with virtual base classes from ever
+ being collected or finalized.
+ 
+ * gc_cleanup now includes gc as a virtual base.  This was enabled by
+ the change in the definition of accessibility.
+ 
+ * I added support for operator new[].  Since most (all?) compilers
+ don't yet support operator new[], it is conditionalized on
+ -DOPERATOR_NEW_ARRAY.  The code is untested, but its trivial and looks
+ correct.
+ 
+ * The test program test_gc_c++ (later renamed test_cpp.cc)
+ tries to test for the C++-specific functionality not tested by the
+ other programs.
+ - Added <unistd.h> include to misc.c.  (Needed for ppcr.)
+ - Added PowerMac port. (Thanks to Patrick Beard again.)
+ - Fixed "srcdir"-related Makefile problems.  Changed things so
+   that all externally visible include files always appear in the
+   include subdirectory of the source.  Made gc.h directly
+   includable from C++ code.  (These were at Per
+   Bothner's suggestion.)
+ - Changed Intel code to also mark from ebp (Kevin Warne's
+   suggestion).
+ - Renamed C++ related files so they could live in a FAT
+   file system. (Charles Fiterman's suggestion.)
+ - Changed Windows NT Makefile to include C++ support in
+   gc.lib.  Added C++ test as Makefile target.
+   
+ Since version 4.3:
+  - ASM_CLEAR_CODE was erroneously defined for HP
+    PA machines, resulting in a compile error.
+  - Fixed OS/2 Makefile to create a library.  (Thanks to
+    Mark Boulter (address@hidden)).
+  - Gc_cleanup objects didn't work if they were created on
+    the stack.  Fixed.
+  - One copy of Gc_cpp.h in the distribution was out of 
+    synch, and failed to document some known compiler
+    problems with explicit destructor invocation.  Partially
+    fixed.  There are probably other compilers on which
+    gc_cleanup is miscompiled.
+  - Fixed Makefile to pass C compiler flags to C++ compiler.
+  - Added Mac fixes.
+  - Fixed os_dep.c to work around what appears to be
+    a new and different VirtualQuery bug under newer
+    versions of win32S.
+  - GC_non_gc_bytes was not correctly maintained by
+    GC_free.  Fixed.  Thanks to James Clark (address@hidden).
+  - Added GC_set_max_heap_size.
+  - Changed allocation code to ignore blacklisting if it is preventing
+    use of a very large block of memory.  This has the advantage
+    that naive code allocating very large objects is much more
+    likely to work.  The downside is you might no
+    longer find out that such code should really use
+    GC_malloc_ignore_off_page.
+  - Changed GC_printf under win32 to close and reopen the file
+    between calls.  FAT file systems otherwise make the log file
+    useless for debugging.
+  - Added GC_try_to_collect and GC_get_bytes_since_gc.  These
+    allow starting an abortable collection during idle times. 
+    This facility does not require special OS support.  (Thanks to
+    Michael Spertus of Geodesic Systems for suggesting this.  It was
+    actually an easy addition.  Kumar Srikantan previously added a similar
+    facility to a now ancient version of the collector.  At the time
+    this was much harder, and the result was less convincing.)
+  - Added some support for the Borland development environment.  (Thanks
+    to John Ellis and Michael Spertus.)
+  - Removed a misfeature from checksums.c that caused unexpected 
+    heap growth.  (Thanks to Scott Schwartz.)
+  - Changed finalize.c to call WARN if it encounters a finalization cycle.
+    WARN is defined in gc_priv.h to write a message, usually to stdout.
+    In many environments, this may be inappropriate.
+  - Renamed NO_PARAMS in gc.h to GC_NO_PARAMS, thus adhering to my own
+    naming convention.
+  - Added GC_set_warn_proc to intercept warnings.
+  - Fixed Amiga port. (Thanks to Michel Schinz (address@hidden).)
+  - Fixed a bug in mark.c that could result in an access to unmapped
+    memory from GC_mark_from_mark_stack on machines with unaligned
+    pointers.
+  - Fixed a win32 specific performance bug that could result in scanning of
+    objects allocated with the system malloc.
+  - Added REDIRECT_MALLOC.
+ 
+ Since version 4.4:
+  - Fixed many minor and one major README bugs. (Thanks to Franklin Chen
+    (address@hidden) for pointing out many of them.)
+  - Fixed ALPHA/OSF/1 dynamic library support. (Thanks to Jonathan Bachrach
+    (address@hidden)).
+  - Added incremental GC support (MPROTECT_VDB) for Linux (with some
+    help from Bruno Haible).
+  - Altered SPARC recognition tests in gc.h and config.h (mostly as
+    suggested by Fergus Henderson).
+  - Added basic incremental GC support for win32, as implemented by
+    Windows NT and Windows 95.  GC_enable_incremental is a noop
+    under win32s, which doesn't implement enough of the VM interface.
+  - Added -DLARGE_CONFIG.
+  - Fixed GC_..._ignore_off_page to also function without
+    -DALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS.
+  - (Hopefully) fixed RS/6000 port.  (Only the test was broken.)
+  - Fixed a performance bug in the nonincremental collector running
+    on machines supporting incremental collection with MPROTECT_VDB
+    (e.g. SunOS 4, DEC AXP).  This turned into a correctness bug under
+    win32s with win32 incremental collection.  (Not all memory protection
+    was disabled.)
+  - Fixed some ppcr related bit rot.
+  - Caused dynamic libraries to be unregistered before reregistering.
+    The old way turned out to be a performance bug on some machines.
+  - GC_root_size was not properly maintained under MSWIN32.
+  - Added -DNO_DEBUGGING and GC_dump.
+  - Fixed a couple of bugs arising with SOLARIS_THREADS +
+    REDIRECT_MALLOC.
+  - Added NetBSD/M68K port.  (Thanks to Peter Seebach
+    <address@hidden>.)
+  - Fixed a serious realloc bug.  For certain object sizes, the collector
+    wouldn't scan the expanded part of the object.  (Thanks to Clay Spence
+    (address@hidden) for noticing the problem, and helping me to
+    track it down.)
+    
+ Since version 4.5:
+  - Added Linux ELF support.  (Thanks to Arrigo Triulzi <address@hidden>.)
+  - GC_base crashed if it was called before any other GC_ routines.
+    This could happen if a gc_cleanup object was allocated outside the heap
+    before any heap allocation.
+  - The heap expansion heuristic was not stable if all objects had finalization
+    enabled.  Fixed finalize.c to count memory in finalization queue and
+    avoid explicit deallocation.  Changed alloc.c to also consider this count.
+    (This is still not recommended.  It's expensive if nothing else.)  Thanks
+    to John Ellis for pointing this out.
+  - GC_malloc_uncollectable(0) was broken.  Thanks to Phong Vo for pointing
+    this out.
+  - The collector didn't compile under Linux 1.3.X.  (Thanks to Fred Gilham for
+    pointing this out.)  The current workaround is ugly, but expected to be
+    temporary.
+  - Fixed a formatting problem for SPARC stack traces.
+  - Fixed some '=='s in os_dep.c that should have been assignments.
+    Fortunately these were in code that should never be executed anyway.
+    (Thanks to Fergus Henderson.)
+  - Fixed the heap block allocator to only drop blacklisted blocks in small
+    chunks.  Made BL_LIMIT self adjusting.  (Both of these were in response
+    to heap growth observed by Paul Graham.)
+  - Fixed the Metrowerks/68K Mac code to also mark from a6.  (Thanks
+    to Patrick Beard.)
+  - Significantly updated README.debugging.
+  - Fixed some problems with longjmps out of signal handlers, especially under
+    Solaris.  Added a workaround for the fact that siglongjmp doesn't appear to
+    do the right thing with -lthread under Solaris.
+  - Added MSDOS/djgpp port.  (Thanks to Mitch Harris  (address@hidden).)
+  - Added "make reserved_namespace" and "make user_namespace".  The
+    first renames ALL "GC_xxx" identifiers as "_GC_xxx".  The second is the
+    inverse transformation.  Note that doing this is guaranteed to break all
+    clients written for the other names.
+  - descriptor field for kind NORMAL in GC_obj_kinds with ADD_BYTE_AT_END
+    defined should be -ALIGNMENT not WORDS_TO_BYTES(-1).  This is
+    a serious bug on machines with pointer alignment of less than a word.
+  - GC_ignore_self_finalize_mark_proc didn't handle pointers to very near the
+    end of the object correctly.  Caused failures of the C++ test on a DEC 
Alpha
+    with g++.
+  - gc_inl.h still had problems.  Partially fixed.  Added warnings at the
+    beginning to hopefully specify the remaining dangers.
+  - Added DATAEND definition to config.h.
+  - Fixed some of the .h file organization.  Fixed "make floppy".
+  
+ Since version 4.6:
+  - Fixed some compilation problems with -DCHECKSUMS (thanks to Ian Searle)
+  - Updated some Mac specific files to synchronize with Patrick Beard.
+  - Fixed a serious bug for machines with non-word-aligned pointers.
+    (Thanks to Patrick Beard for pointing out the problem.  The collector
+    should fail almost any conceivable test immediately on such machines.)
+ 
+ Since version 4.7:
+  - Changed a "comment" in a MacOS specific part of mach-dep.c that caused
+    gcc to fail on other platforms.
+ 
+ Since version 4.8
+  - More README.debugging fixes.
+  - Objects ready for finalization, but not finalized in the same GC
+    cycle, could be prematurely collected.  This occasionally happened
+    in test_cpp.
+  - Too little memory was obtained from the system for very large
+    objects.  That could cause a heap explosion if these objects were
+    not contiguous (e.g. under PCR), and too much of them was blacklisted.
+  - Due to an improper initialization, the collector was too hesitant to
+    allocate blacklisted objects immediately after system startup.
+  - Moved GC_arrays from the data into the bss segment by not explicitly
+    initializing it to zero.  This significantly
+    reduces the size of executables, and probably avoids some disk accesses
+    on program startup.  It's conceivable that it might break a port that I
+    didn't test.
+  - Fixed EMX_MAKEFILE to reflect the gc_c++.h to gc_cpp.h renaming which
+    occurred a while ago.
+ 
+ Since 4.9:
+  - Fixed a typo around a call to GC_collect_or_expand in alloc.c.  It broke
+    handling of out of memory.  (Thanks to Patrick Beard for noticing.)
+ 
+ Since 4.10:
+  - Rationalized (hopefully) GC_try_to_collect in an incremental collection
+    environment.  It appeared to not handle a call while a collection was in
+    progress, and was otherwise too conservative.
+  - Merged GC_reclaim_or_delete_all into GC_reclaim_all to get rid of some
+    code.
+  - Added Patrick Beard's Mac fixes, with substantial completely untested
+    modifications.
+  - Fixed the MPROTECT_VDB code to deal with large pages and imprecise
+    fault addresses (as on an UltraSPARC running Solaris 2.5).  Note that this
+    was not a problem in the default configuration, which uses PROC_VDB.
+  - The DEC Alpha assembly code needed to restore $gp between calls.
+    Thanks to Fergus Henderson for tracking this down and supplying a
+    patch.
+  - The write command for "de" was completely broken for large files.
+    I used the easiest portable fix, which involved changing the semantics
+    so that f.new is written instead of overwriting f.  That's safer anyway.
+  - Added README.solaris2 with a discussion of the possible problems of
+    mixing the collector's sbrk allocation with malloc/realloc.
+  - Changed the data segment starting address for SGI machines.  The
+    old code failed under IRIX6.
+  - Required double word alignment for MIPS.
+  - Various minor fixes to remove warnings.
+  - Attempted to fix some Solaris threads problems reported by Zhiying Chen.
+    In particular, the collector could try to fork a thread with the
+    world stopped as part of GC_thr_init.  It also failed to deal with
+    the case in which the original thread terminated before the whole
+    process did.
+  - Added -DNO_EXECUTE_PERMISSION.  This has a major performance impact
+    on the incremental collector under Irix, and perhaps under other
+    operating systems.
+  - Added some code to support allocating the heap with mmap.  This may
+    be preferable under some circumstances.
+  - Integrated dynamic library support for HP.
+    (Thanks to Knut Tvedten <address@hidden>.)
+  - Integrated James Clark's win32 threads support, and made a number
+    of changes to it, many of which were suggested by Pontus Rydin.
+    This is still not 100% solid.
+  - Integrated Alistair Crooks' support for UTS4 running on an Amdahl
+    370-class machine.
+  - Fixed a serious bug in explicitly typed allocation.  Objects requiring
+    large descriptors where handled in a way that usually resulted in
+    a segmentation fault in the marker.  (Thanks to Jeremy Fitzhardinge
+    for helping to track this down.)
+  - Added partial support for GNU win32 development.  (Thanks to Fergus
+    Henderson.)
+  - Added optional support for Java-style finalization semantics.  (Thanks
+    to Patrick Bridges.)  This is recommended only for Java implementations.
+  - GC_malloc_uncollectable faulted instead of returning 0 when out of
+    memory.  (Thanks to address@hidden for noticing.)
+  - Calls to GC_base before the collector was initialized failed on a
+    DEC Alpha.  (Thanks to Matthew Flatt.)
+  - Added base pointer checking to GC_REGISTER_FINALIZER in debugging
+    mode, at the suggestion of Jeremy Fitzhardinge.
+  - GC_debug_realloc failed for uncollectable objects.  (Thanks to
+    Jeremy Fitzhardinge.)
+  - Explicitly typed allocation could crash if it ran out of memory.
+    (Thanks to Jeremy Fitzhardinge.)
+  - Added minimal support for a DEC Alpha running Linux.
+  - Fixed a problem with allocation of objects whose size overflowed
+    ptrdiff_t.  (This now fails unconditionally, as it should.)
+  - Added the beginning of Irix pthread support.
+  - Integrated Xiaokun Zhu's fixes for djgpp 2.01.
+  - Added SGI-style STL allocator support (gc_alloc.h).
+  - Fixed a serious bug in README.solaris2.  Multithreaded programs must 
include
+    gc.h with SOLARIS_THREADS defined.
+  - Changed GC_free so it actually deallocates uncollectable objects.
+    (Thanks to Peter Chubb for pointing out the problem.)
+  - Added Linux ELF support for dynamic libararies.  (Thanks again to
+    Patrick Bridges.)
+  - Changed the Borland cc configuration so that the assembler is not
+    required.
+  - Fixed a bug in the C++ test that caused it to fail in 64-bit
+    environments.
+ 
+ Since 4.11:
+  - Fixed ElfW definition in dyn_load.c. (Thanks to Fergus Henderson.)
+    This prevented the dynamic library support from compiling on some
+    older ELF Linux systems.
+  - Fixed UTS4 port (which I apparently mangled during the integration)
+    (Thanks to again to Alistair Crooks.)
+  - "Make C++" failed on Suns with SC4.0, due to a problem with "bool".
+    Fixed in gc_priv.h.
+  - Added more pieces for GNU win32.  (Thanks to Timothy N. Newsham.)
+    The current state of things should suffice for at least some
+    applications.
+  - Changed the out of memory retry count handling as suggested by
+    Kenjiro Taura.  (This matters only if GC_max_retries > 0, which
+    is no longer the default.)
+  - If a /proc read failed repeatedly, GC_written_pages was not updated
+    correctly.  (Thanks to Peter Chubb for diagnosing this.)
+  - Under unlikely circumstances, the allocator could infinite loop in
+    an out of memory situation.  (Thanks again to Kenjiro Taura for
+    identifying the problem and supplying a fix.)
+  - Fixed a syntactic error in the DJGPP code.  (Thanks to Fergus
+    Henderson for finding this by inspection.)  Also fixed a test program
+    problem with DJGPP (Thanks to Peter Monks.)
+  - Atomic uncollectable objects were not treated correctly by the
+    incremental collector.  This resulted in weird log statistics and
+    occasional performance problems.  (Thanks to Peter Chubb for pointing
+    this out.)
+  - Fixed some problems resulting from compilers that dont define
+    __STDC__.  In this case void * and char * were used inconsistently
+    in some cases.  (Void * should not have been used at all.  If
+    you have an ANSI superset compiler that does not define __STDC__,
+    please compile with -D__STDC__=0. Thanks to Manuel Serrano and others
+    for pointing out the problem.)
+  - Fixed a compilation problem on Irix with -n32 and -DIRIX_THREADS.
+    Also fixed some other IRIX_THREADS problems which may or may not have
+    had observable symptoms.
+  - Fixed an HP PA compilation problem in dyn_load.c.  (Thanks to
+    Philippe Queinnec.)
+  - SEGV fault handlers sometimes did not get reset correctly.  (Thanks
+    to David Pickens.)
+  - Added a fix for SOLARIS_THREADS on Intel.  (Thanks again to David
+    Pickens.)  This probably needs more work to become functional.
+  - Fixed struct sigcontext_struct in os_dep.c for compilation under
+    Linux 2.1.X.       (Thanks to Fergus Henderson.)
+  - Changed the DJGPP STACKBOTTOM and DATASTART values to those suggested
+    by Kristian Kristensen.  These may still not be right, but it is
+    it is likely to work more often than what was there before.  They may
+    even be exactly right.
+  - Added a #include <string.h> to test_cpp.cc.  This appears to help
+    with HP/UX and gcc.  (Thanks to address@hidden)
+  - Version 4.11 failed to run in incremental mode on recent 64-bit Irix
+    kernels.  This was a problem related to page unaligned heap segments.
+    Changed the code to page align heap sections on all platforms.
+    (I had mistakenly identified this as a kernel problem earlier.
+    It was not.)
+  - Version 4.11 did not make allocated storage executable, except on
+    one or two platforms, due to a bug in a #if test.  (Thanks to Dave
+    Grove for pointing this out.)
+  - Added sparc_sunos4_mach_dep.s to support Sun's compilers under SunOS4.
+  - Added GC_exclude_static_roots.
+  - Fixed the object size mapping algorithm.  This shouldn't matter,
+    but the old code was ugly.
+  - Heap checking code could die if one of the allocated objects was
+    larger than its base address.  (Unsigned underflow problem.  Thanks
+    to Clay Spence for isolating the problem.)
+  - Added RS6000 (AIX) dynamic library support and fixed STACK_BOTTOM.
+    (Thanks to Fred Stearns.)
+  - Added Fergus Henderson's patches for improved robustness with large
+    heaps and lots of blacklisting.
+  - Added Peter Chubb's changes to support Solaris Pthreads, to support
+    MMAP allocation in Solaris, to allow Solaris to find dynamic libraries
+    through /proc, to add malloc_typed_ignore_off_page, and a few other
+    minor features and bug fixes.
+  - The Solaris 2 port should not use sbrk.  I received confirmation from
+    Sun that the use of sbrk and malloc in the same program is not
+    supported.  The collector now defines USE_MMAP by default on Solaris.
+  - Replaced the djgpp makefile with Gary Leavens' version.
+  - Fixed MSWIN32 detection test.
+  - Added Fergus Henderson's patches to allow putting the collector into
+    a DLL under GNU win32.
+  - Added Ivan V. Demakov's port to Watcom C on X86.
+  - Added Ian Piumarta's Linux/PowerPC port.
+  - On Brian Burton's suggestion added PointerFreeGC to the placement
+    options in gc_cpp.h.  This is of course unsafe, and may be controversial.
+    On the other hand, it seems to be needed often enough that it's worth
+    adding as a standard facility.
+ 
+ Since 4.12:
+  - Fixed a crucial bug in the Watcom port.  There was a redundant decl
+    of GC_push_one in gc_priv.h.
+  - Added FINALIZE_ON_DEMAND.
+  - Fixed some pre-ANSI cc problems in test.c.
+  - Removed getpagesize() use for Solaris.  It seems to be missing in one
+    or two versions.
+  - Fixed bool handling for SPARCCompiler version 4.2.
+  - Fixed some files in include that had gotten unlinked from the main
+    copy.
+  - Some RS/6000 fixes (missing casts).  Thanks to Toralf Foerster.
+  - Fixed several problems in GC_debug_realloc, affecting mostly the
+    FIND_LEAK case.
+  - GC_exclude_static_roots contained a buggy unsigned comparison to
+    terminate a loop.  (Thanks to Wilson Ho.)
+  - CORD_str failed if the substring occurred at the last possible position.
+    (Only affects cord users.)
+  - Fixed Linux code to deal with RedHat 5.0 and integrated Peter Bigot's
+    os_dep.c code for dealing with various Linux versions.
+  - Added workaround for Irix pthreads sigaction bug and possible signal
+    misdirection problems.
+ Since alpha1:
+  - Changed RS6000 STACKBOTTOM.
+  - Integrated Patrick Beard's Mac changes.
+  - Alpha1 didn't compile on Irix m.n, m < 6.
+  - Replaced Makefile.dj with a new one from Gary Leavens.
+  - Added Andrew Stitcher's changes to support SCO OpenServer.
+  - Added PRINT_BLACK_LIST, to allow debugging of high densities of false
+    pointers.
+  - Added code to debug allocator to keep track of return address
+    in GC_malloc caller, thus giving a bit more context.
+  - Changed default behavior of large block allocator to more
+    aggressively avoid fragmentation.  This is likely to slow down the
+    collector when it succeeds at reducing space cost.
+  - Integrated Fergus Henderson's CYGWIN32 changes.  They are untested,
+    but needed for newer versions.
+  - USE_MMAP had some serious bugs.  This caused the collector to fail
+    consistently on Solaris with -DSMALL_CONFIG.
+  - Added Linux threads support, thanks largely to Fergus Henderson.
+ Since alpha2:
+  - Fixed more Linux threads problems.
+  - Changed default GC_free_space_divisor to 3 with new large block allocation.
+    (Thanks to Matthew Flatt for some measurements that suggest the old
+    value sometimes favors space too much over time.)
+  - More CYGWIN32 fixes.
+  - Integrated Tyson-Dowd's Linux-M68K port.
+  - Minor HP PA and DEC UNIX fixes from Fergus Henderson.
+  - Integrated Christoffe Raffali's Linux-SPARC changes.
+  - Allowed for one more GC fixup iteration after a full GC in incremental
+    mode.  Some quick measurements suggested that this significantly
+    reduces pause times even with smaller GC_RATE values.
+  - Moved some more GC data structures into GC_arrays.  This decreases
+    pause times and GC overhead, but makes debugging slightly less convenient.
+  - Fixed namespace pollution problem ("excl_table").
+  - Made GC_incremental a constant for -DSMALL_CONFIG, hopefully shrinking
+    that slightly.
+  - Added some win32 threads fixes.
+  - Integrated Ivan Demakov and David Stes' Watcom fixes.
+  - Various other minor fixes contributed by many people.
+  - Renamed config.h to gcconfig.h, since config.h tends to be used for
+    many other things.
+  - Integrated Matthew Flatt's support for 68K MacOS "far globals".
+  - Fixed up some of the dynamic library Makefile targets for consistency
+    across platforms.
+  - Fixed a USE_MMAP typo that caused out-of-memory handling to fail
+    on Solaris.
+  - Added code to test.c to test thread creation a bit more.
+  - Integrated GC_win32_free_heap, as suggested by Ivan Demakov.
+  - Fixed Solaris 2.7 stack base finding problem.  (This may actually
+    have been done in an earlier alpha release.)
+ Since alpha3:
+  - Fixed MSWIN32 recognition test, which interfered with cygwin.
+  - Removed unnecessary gc_watcom.asm from distribution.  Removed
+    some obsolete README.win32 text.
+  - Added Alpha Linux incremental GC support.  (Thanks to Philipp Tomsich
+    for code for retrieving the fault address in a signal handler.)
+    Changed Linux signal handler context argument to be a pointer.
+  - Took care of some new warnings generated by the 7.3 SGI compiler.
+  - Integrated Phillip Musumeci's FreeBSD/ELF fixes.
+  - -DIRIX_THREADS was broken with the -o32 ABI (typo in gc_priv.h>
+ 
+ Since 4.13:
+  - Fixed GC_print_source_ptr to not use a prototype.
+  - generalized CYGWIN test.
+  - gc::new did the wrong thing with PointerFreeGC placement.
+    (Thanks to Rauli Ruohonen.)
+  - In the ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS (default) case, some callee-save register
+    values could fail to be scanned if the register was saved and
+    reused in a GC frame.  This showed up in verbose mode with gctest
+    compiled with an unreleased SGI compiler.  I vaguely recall an old
+    bug report that may have been related.  The bug was probably quite old.
+    (The problem was that the stack scanning could be deferred until
+    after the relevant frame was overwritten, and the new save location
+    might be outside the scanned area.  Fixed by more eager stack scanning.)
+  - PRINT_BLACK_LIST had some problems.  A few source addresses were garbage.
+  - Replaced Makefile.dj and added -I flags to cord make targets.
+    (Thanks to Gary Leavens.)
+  - GC_try_to_collect was broken with the nonincremental collector.
+  - gc_cleanup destructors could pass the wrong address to
+    GC_register_finalizer_ignore_self in the presence of multiple
+    inheritance.  (Thanks to Darrell Schiebel.)
+  - Changed PowerPC Linux stack finding code.
+ 
+ Since 4.14alpha1
+  - -DSMALL_CONFIG did not work reliably with large (> 4K) pages.
+    Recycling the mark stack during expansion could result in a size
+    zero heap segment, which confused things.  (This was probably also an
+    issue with the normal config and huge pages.)
+  - Did more work to make sure that callee-save registers were scanned
+    completely, even with the setjmp-based code.  Added USE_GENERIC_PUSH_REGS
+    macro to facilitate testing on machines I have access to.
+  - Added code to explicitly push register contents for win32 threads.
+    This seems to be necessary.  (Thanks to Pierre de Rop.)
+ 
+ Since 4.14alpha2
+  - changed STACKBOTTOM for DJGPP (Thanks to Salvador Eduardo Tropea).
+  
+ Since 4.14
+  - Reworked large block allocator.  Now uses multiple doubly linked free
+    lists to approximate best fit.
+  - Changed heap expansion heuristic.  Entirely free blocks are no longer
+    counted towards the heap size.  This seems to have a major impact on
+    heap size stability; the old version could expand the heap way too
+    much in the presence of large block fragmentation.
+  - added -DGC_ASSERTIONS and some simple assertions inside the collector.
+    This is mainlyt for collector debugging.
+  - added -DUSE_MUNMAP to allow the heap to shrink.  Suupported on only
+    a few UNIX-like platforms for now.
+  - added GC_dump_regions() for debugging of fragmentation issues.
+  - Changed PowerPC pointer alignment under Linux to 4.  (This needs
+    checking by someone who has one.  The suggestions came to me via a
+    rather circuitous path.)
+  - Changed the Linux/Alpha port to walk the data segment backwards until
+    it encounters a SIGSEGV.  The old way to find the start of the data
+    segment broke with a recent release.
+  - cordxtra.c needed to call GC_REGISTER_FINALIZER instead of
+    GC_register_finalizer, so that it would continue to work with GC_DEBUG.
+  - allochblk sometimes cleared the wrong block for debugging purposes
+    when it dropped blacklisted blocks.  This could result in spurious
+    error reports with GC_DEBUG.
+  - added MACOS X Server support.  (Thanks to Andrew Stone.)
+  - Changed the Solaris threads code to ignore stack limits > 8 MB with
+    a warning.  Empirically, it is not safe to access arbitrary pages
+    in such large stacks.  And the dirty bit implementation does not
+    guarantee that none of them will be accessed.
+  - Integrated Martin Tauchmann's Amiga changes.
+  - Integrated James Dominy's OpenBSD/SPARC port.
+ 
+ Since 5.0alpha1
+  - Fixed bugs introduced in alpha1 (OpenBSD & large block initialization).
+  - Added -DKEEP_BACK_PTRS and backptr.h interface.  (The implementation
+    idea came from Al Demers.)
+ 
+ Since 5.0alpha2
+  - Added some highly incomplete code to support a copied young generation.
+    Comments on nursery.h are appreciated.
+  - Changed -DFIND_LEAK, -DJAVA_FINALIZATION, and -DFINALIZE_ON_DEMAND,
+    so the same effect could be obtained with a runtime switch.   This is
+    a step towards standardizing on a single dynamic GC library.
+  - Significantly changed the way leak detection is handled, as a consequence
+    of the above.
+ 
+ Since 5.0 alpha3
+  - Added protection fault handling patch for Linux/M68K from Fergus
+    Henderson and Roman Hodek.
+  - Removed the tests for SGI_SOURCE in new_gc_alloc.h.  This was causing that
+    interface to fail on nonSGI platforms.
+  - Changed the Linux stack finding code to use /proc, after changing it
+    to use HEURISTIC1.  (Thanks to David Mossberger for pointing out the
+    /proc hook.)
+  - Added HP/UX incremental GC support and HP/UX 11 thread support.
+    Thread support is currently still flakey.
+  - Added basic Linux/IA64 support.
+  - Integrated Anthony Green's PicoJava support.
+  - Integrated Scott Ananian's StrongARM/NetBSD support.
+  - Fixed some fairly serious performance bugs in the incremental
+    collector.  These have probably been there essentially forever.
+    (Mark bits were sometimes set before scanning dirty pages.
+    The reclaim phase unnecessarily dirtied full small object pages.)
+  - Changed the reclaim phase to ignore nearly full pages to avoid
+    touching them.
+  - Limited GC_black_list_spacing to roughly the heap growth increment.
+  - Changed full collection triggering heuristic to decrease full GC
+    frequency by default, but to explicitly trigger full GCs during
+    heap growth.  This doesn't always improve things, but on average it's
+    probably a win.
+  - GC_debug_free(0, ...) failed.  Thanks to Fergus Henderson for the
+    bug report and fix.
+ 
+ Since 5.0 alpha4
+  - GC_malloc_explicitly_typed and friends sometimes failed to
+    initialize first word.
+  - Added allocation routines and support in the marker for mark descriptors
+    in a type structure referenced by the first word of an object.  This was
+    introduced to support gcj, but hopefully in a way that makes it
+    generically useful.
+  - Added GC_requested_heapsize, and inhibited collections in nonincremental
+    mode if the actual used heap size is less than what was explicitly
+    requested.
+  - The Solaris pthreads version of GC_pthread_create didn't handle a NULL
+    attribute pointer.  Solaris thread support used the wrong default thread
+    stack size.  (Thanks to Melissa O'Neill for the patch.)
+  - Changed PUSH_CONTENTS macro to no longer modify first parameter.
+    This usually doesn't matter, but it was certainly an accident waiting
+    to happen ...
+  - Added GC_register_finalizer_no_order and friends to gc.h.  They're
+    needed by Java implementations.
+  - Integrated a fix for a win32 deadlock resulting from clock() calling
+    malloc.  (Thanks to Chris Dodd.)
+  - Integrated Hiroshi Kawashima's port to Linux/MIPS.  This was designed
+    for a handheld platform, and may or may not be sufficient for other
+    machines.
+  - Fixed a va_arg problem with the %c specifier in cordprnt.c.  It appears
+    that this was always broken, but recent versions of gcc are the first to
+    report the (statically detectable) bug.
+  - Added an attempt at a more general solution to dlopen races/deadlocks.
+    GC_dlopen now temporarily disables collection.  Still not ideal, but ...
+  - Added -DUSE_I686_PREFETCH, -DUSE_3DNOW_PREFETCH, and support for IA64
+    prefetch instructions.  May improve performance measurably, but I'm not
+    sure the code will run correctly on processors that don't support the
+    instruction.  Won't build except with very recent gcc.
+  - Added caching for header lookups in the marker.  This seems to result
+    in a barely measurable performance gain.  Added support for interleaved
+    lookups of two pointers, but unconfigured that since the performance
+    gain is currently near zero, and it adds to code size.
+  - Changed Linux DATA_START definition to check both data_start and
+    __data_start, since nothing else seems to be portable.
+  - Added -DUSE_LD_WRAP to optionally take advantage of the GNU ld function
+    wrapping mechanism.  Probably currently useful only on Linux.
+  - Moved some variables for the scratch allocator into GC_arrays, on
+    Martin Hirzel's suggestion.
+  - Fixed a win32 threads bug that caused the collector to not look for
+    interior pointers from one of the thread stacks without
+    ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS.  (Thanks to Jeff Sturm.)
+  - Added Mingw32 support.  (Thanks again to Jeff Sturm for the patch.)
+  - Changed the alpha port to use the generic register scanning code instead
+    of alpha_mach_dep.s.  Alpha_mach_dep.s doesn't look for pointers in fp
+    registers, but gcc sometimes spills pointers there.  (Thanks to Manuel
+    Serrano for helping me debug this by email.)  Changed the IA64 code to
+    do something similar for similar reasons.
+ 
+ [5.0alpha5 doesn't really exist, but it may have escaped.]
+ 
+ Since 5.0alpha6:
+  - -DREDIRECT_MALLOC was broken in alpha6. Fixed.
+  - Cleaned up gc_ccp.h slightly, thus also causing the HP C++ compiler to
+    accept it.
+  - Removed accidental reference to dbg_mlc.c, which caused dbg_mlc.o to be
+    linked into every executable.
+  - Added PREFETCH to bitmap marker.  Changed it to use the header cache.
+  - GC_push_marked sometimes pushed one object too many, resulting in a
+    segmentation fault in GC_mark_from_mark_stack.  This was probably an old
+    bug.  It finally showed up in gctest on win32.
+  - Gc_priv.h erroneously #defined GC_incremental to be TRUE instead of FALSE
+    when SMALL_CONFIG was defined.  This was no doubt a major performance bug 
for
+    the default win32 configuration.
+  - Removed -DSMALL_CONFIG from NT_MAKEFILE.  It seemed like an anchronism now
+    that the average PC has 64MB or so.
+  - Integrated Bryce McKinley's patches for linux threads and dynamic loading
+    from the libgcj tree.  Turned on dynamic loading support for Linux/PPC.
+  - Changed the stack finding code to use environ on HP/UX.  (Thanks
+    to Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera for the suggestion.)  This should probably
+    be done on other platforms, too.  Since I can't test those, that'll
+    wait until after 5.0.
+ 
+ Since 5.0alpha7:
+  - Fixed threadlibs.c for linux threads.  -DUSE_LD_WRAP was broken and
+    -ldl was omitted.  Fixed Linux stack finding code to handle
+    -DUSE_LD_WRAP correctly.
+  - Added MSWIN32 exception handler around marker, so that the collector
+    can recover from root segments that are unmapped during the collection.
+    This caused occasional failures under Windows 98, and may also be
+    an issue under Windows NT/2000.
+ 
+ Since 5.0
+  - Fixed a gc.h header bug which showed up under Irix.  (Thanks to
+    Dan Sullivan.)
+  - Fixed a typo in GC_double_descr in typd_mlc.c.
+    This probably could result in objects described by array descriptors not
+    getting traced correctly.  (Thanks to Ben Hutchings for pointing this out.)
+  - The block nearly full tests in reclaim.c were not correct for 64 bit
+    environments.  This could result in unnecessary heap growth under unlikely
+    conditions.
+ 
+ Since 5.1
+  - dyn_load.c declared GC_scratch_last_end_ptr as an extern even if it
+    was defined as a macro.  This prevented the collector from building on
+    Irix.
+  - We quietly assumed that indirect mark descriptors were never 0.
+    Our own typed allocation interface violated that.  This could result
+    in segmentation faults in the marker with typed allocation.
+  - Fixed a _DUSE_MUNMAP bug in the heap block allocation code.
+    (Thanks to Ben Hutchings for the patch.)
+  - Taught the collector about VC++ handling array operator new.
+    (Thanks again to Ben Hutchings for the patch.)
+  - The two copies of gc_hdrs.h had diverged.  Made one a link to the other
+    again.
+ 
+ Since 5.2  (A few 5.2 patches are not in 6.0alpha1)
+  - Fixed _end declaration for OSF1.
+  - There were lots of spurious leak reports in leak detection mode, caused
+    by the fact that some pages were not being swept, and hence unmarked
+    objects weren't making it onto free lists.  (This bug dated back to 5.0.)
+  - Fixed a typo in the liblinuxgc.so Makefile rule.
+  - Added the GetExitCodeThread to Win32 GC_stop_world to (mostly) work
+    around a Windows 95 GetOpenFileName problem.  (Thanks to Jacob Navia.)
+ 
+ Since 5.3
+  - Fixed a typo that prevented compilation with -DUSE_3DNOW_PREFETCH.
+    (Thanks to Shawn Wagner for actually testing this.)
+  - Fixed GC_is_thread_stack in solaris_threads.c.  It forgot to return a value
+    in the common case.  I wonder why nobody noticed?
+  - Fixed another silly syntax problem in GC_double_descr.  (Thanks to
+    Fergus Henderson for finding it.)
+  - Fixed a GC_gcj_malloc bug: It tended to release the allocator lock twice.
+ 
+ Since 5.4  (A few 5.3 patches are not in 6.0alpha2)
+  - Added HP/PA prefetch support.
+  - Added -DDBG_HDRS_ALL and -DSHORT_DBG_HDRS to reduce the cost and improve
+    the reliability of generating pointer backtrace information, e.g. in
+    the Bigloo environment.
+  - Added parallel marking support (-DPARALLEL_MARK).  This currently
+    works only under IA32 and IA64 Linux, but it shouldn't be hard to adapt
+    to other platforms.  This is intended to be a lighter-weight (less
+    new code, probably not as scalable) solution than the work by Toshio Endo
+    et al, at the University of Tokyo.  A number of their ideas were
+    reused, though the code wasn't, and the underlying data structure
+    is significantly different.  In particular, we keep the global mark
+    stack as a single shared data structure, but most of the work is done
+    on smaller thread-local mark stacks.
+  - Changed GC_malloc_many to be cheaper, and to require less mutual exclusion
+    with -DPARALLEL_MARK.
+  - Added full support for thread local allocation under Linux
+    (-DTHREAD_LOCAL_ALLOC).  This is a thin veneer on GC_malloc_many, and
+    should be easily portable to other platforms, especially those that
+    support pthreads.
+  - CLEAR_DOUBLE was not always getting invoked when it should have been.
+  - GC_gcj_malloc and friends used different out of memory handling than
+    everything else, probably because I forgot about one when I implemented
+    the other.  They now both call GC_oom_fn(), not GC_oom_action().
+  - Integrated Jakub Jelinek's fixes for Linux/SPARC.
+  - Moved GC_objfreelist, GC_aobjfreelist, and GC_words_allocd out of
+    GC_arrays, and separately registered the first two as excluded roots.
+    This makes code compiled with gc_inl.h less dependent on the
+    collector version.  (It would be nice to remove the inclusion of
+    gc_priv.h by gc_inl.h completely, but we're not there yet.  The
+    locking definitions in gc_priv.h are still referenced.)
+    This change was later coniditoned on SEPARATE_GLOBALS, which
+    is not defined by default, since it involves a performance hit.
+  - Register GC_obj_kinds separately as an excluded root region.  The
+    attempt to register it with GC_arrays was usually failing.  (This wasn't
+    serious, but seemed to generate some confusion.) 
+  - Moved backptr.h to gc_backptr.h.
+ 
+ Since 6.0alpha1
+  - Added USE_MARK_BYTES to reduce the need for compare-and-swap on platforms
+    for which that's expensive.
+  - Fixed a locking bug ib GC_gcj_malloc and some locking assertion problems.
+  - Added a missing volatile to OR_WORD and renamed the parameter to
+    GC_compare_and_swap so it's not a C++ reserved word.  (Thanks to
+    Toshio Endo for pointing out both of those.)
+  - Changed Linux dynamic library registration code to look at /proc/self/maps
+    instead of the rld data structures when REDIRECT_MALLOC is defined.
+    Otherwise some of the rld data data structures may be prematurely garbage
+    collected.  (Thanks to Eric Benson for helping to track this down.)
+  - Fixed USE_LD_WRAP a bit more, so it should now work without threads.
+  - Renamed XXX_THREADS macros to GC_XXX_THREADS for namespace correctness.
+    Tomporarily added some backward compatibility definitions.  Renamed
+    USE_LD_WRAP to GC_USE_LD_WRAP.
+  - Many MACOSX POWERPC changes, some additions to the gctest output, and
+    a few minor generic bug fixes.  (Thanks to Dietmar Planitzer.)
+ 
+ Since 6.0 alpha2
+  - Fixed the /proc/self/maps code to not seek, since that apparently is not
+    reliable across all interesting kernels.
+  - Fixed some compilation problems in the absence of PARALLEL_MARK
+    (introduced in alpha2).
+  - Fixed an algorithmic problem with PARALLEL_MARK.  If work needs to
+    be given back to the main mark "stack", the BOTTOM entries of the local
+    stack should be given away, not the top ones.  This has substantial
+    performance impact, especially for > 2 processors, from what I can tell.
+  - Extracted gc_lock.h from gc_priv.h.  This should eventually make it a
+    bit easier to avoid including gc_priv.h in clients.
+  - Moved all include files to include/ and removed duplicate links to the
+    same file.  The old scheme was a bad idea because it was too easy to get 
the
+    copies out of sync, and many systems don't support hard links.
+    Unfortunately, it's likely that I broke some of the non-Unix Makefiles in
+    the process, although I tried to update them appropriately.
+  - Removed the partial support for a copied nursery.  It's not clear that
+    this would be a tremendous win, since we don't consistently lose to
+    generational copying collectors.  And it would significantly complicate
+    many things.  May be reintroduced if/when it really turns out to win.
+  - Removed references to IRIX_JDK_THREADS, since I believe there never
+    were and never will be any clients.
+  - Added some code to linux_threads.c to possibly support HPUX threads
+    using the Linux code.  Unfortunately, it doesn't work yet, and is
+    currently disabled.
+  - Added support under Linux/X86 for saving the call chain, both in (debug)
+    objects for client debugging, and in GC_arrays._last_stack for GC
+    debugging.  This was previously supported only under Solaris.  It is
+    not enabled by default under X86, since it requires that code be compiled
+    to explicitly dave frame pointers on the call stack.  (With gcc this
+    currently happens by default, but is often turned off explicitly.)
+    To turn it on, define SAVE_CALL_CHAIN.
+  
+ Since 6.0 alpha3
+  - Moved up the detection of mostly full blocks to the initiatiation of the
+    sweep phase.  This eliminates some lock conention in the PARALLEL_MARK 
case,
+    as multiple threads try to look at mostly full blocks concurrently.
+  - Restored the code in GC_malloc_many that grabs a prefix of the global
+    free list.  This avoids the case in which every GC_malloc_many call
+    tries and fails to allocate a new heap block, and the returns a single
+    object from the global free list.
+  - Some minor fixes in new_hblk.c.  (Attempted to build free lists in order
+    of increasing addresses instead of decreasing addresses for cache 
performance
+    reasons.  But this seems to be only a very minor gain with -DEAGER_SWEEP,
+    and a loss in other cases.  So the change was backed out.)
+  - Fixed some of the documentation.  (Thanks in large part to Fergus
+    Henderson.)
+  - Fixed the Linux USE_PROC_FOR_LIBRARIES code to deal with apps that perform
+    large numbers of mmaps.  (Thanks to Eric Benson.)  Also fixed that code to
+    deal with short reads.
+  - Added GC_get_total_bytes(). 
+  - Fixed leak detection mode to avoid spurious messages under linuxthreads.
+    (This should also now be easy for the other supported threads packages.
+    But the code is tricky enough that I'm hesitant to do it without being able
+    to test.  Everything allocated in the GC thread support itself should be
+    explicitly deallocated.)
+  - Made it possible (with luck) to redirect malloc to GC_local_malloc.
+ 
+ Since 6.0 alpha4
+  - Changed the definition of GC_pause in linux_threads.c to use a volatile
+    asm.  Some versions of gcc apparently optimize away writes to local 
volatile
+    variables.  This caused poor locking behaviour starting at about
+    4 processors.
+  - Added GC_start_blocking(), GC_end_blocking() calls and wrapper for sleep
+    to linux_threads.c.
+    The first two calls could be used to generally avoid sending GC signals to
+    blocked threads, avoiding both premature wakeups and unnecessary overhead.
+  - Fixed a serious bug in thread-local allocation.  At thread termination,
+    GC_free could get called on small integers.  Changed the code for thread
+    termination to more efficiently return left-over free-lists.
+  - Integrated Kjetil Matheussen's BeOS support.
+  - Rearranged the directory structure to create the doc and tests
+    subdirectories.
+  - Sort of integrated Eric Benson's patch for OSF1.  This provided basic
+    OSF1 thread support by suitably extending hpux_irix_threads.c.  Based
+    on earlier email conversations with David Butenhof, I suspect that it
+    will be more reliable in the long run to base this on linux_threads.c
+    instead.  Thus I attempted to patch up linux_threads.c based on Eric's 
code.
+    The result is almost certainly broken, but hopefully close enough that
+    someone with access to a machine can pick it up.
+  - Integrated lots of minor changes from the NetBSD distribution.  (These
+    were supplied by David Brownlee.  I'm not sure about the original
+    authors.)
+  - Hacked a bit more on the HP/UX thread-support in linux_threads.c.  It
+    now appears to work in the absence of incremental collection.  Renamed
+    hpux_irix_threads.c back to irix_threads.c, and removed the attempt to
+    support HPUX there.
+  - Changed gc.h to define _REENTRANT in cases in which it should already
+    have been defined. It is still safer to also define it on the command
+    line. 
+ 
+ Since 6.0alpha5:
+  - Changed the definition of DATASTART on ALPHA and IA64, where data_start
+    and __data_start are not defined by earlier versions of glibc.  This might
+    need to be fixed on other platforms as well.
+  - Changed the way the stack base and backing store base are found on IA64.
+    This should now remain reliable on future kernels.  But since it relies
+    on /proc, it will no longer work in the simulated NUE environment.
+  - Made the call to random() in dbg_mlc.c with -DKEEP_BACK_PTRS dependent
+    on the OS.  On non-Unix systems, rand() should be used instead.  Handled
+    small RAND_MAX.  (Thanks to Peter Ross for pointing this out.)
+  - Fixed the cord make rules to create the cord subdirectory, if necessary.
+    (Thanks to Doug Moen.)
+  - Changed fo_object_size calculation in finalize.c.  Turned finalization
+    of nonheap object into a no-op.  Removed anachronism from GC_size()
+    implementation.
+  - Changed GC_push_dirty call in solaris_threads.c to GC_push_selected.
+    It was missed in a previous renaming. (Thanks to Vladimir Tsichevski
+    for pointing this out.)
+  - Arranged to not not mask SIGABRT in linux_threads.c.  (Thanks to Bryce
+    McKinlay.) 
+  - Added GC_no_dls hook for applications that want to register their own
+    roots.
+  - Integrated Kjetil Matheussen's Amiga changes.
+  - Added FREEBSD_STACKBOTTOM.  Changed the X86/FreeBSD port to use it.
+    (Thanks to Matthew Flatt.)
+  - Added pthread_detach interception for platforms supported by 
linux_threads.c
+    and irix_threads.c.  Should also be added for Solaris?
+  - Changed the USE_MMAP code to check for the case in which we got the
+    high end of the address space, i.e. mem_ptr + mem_sz == 0.  It appears
+    that this can happen under Solaris 7.  It seems to be allowed by what
+    I would claim is an oversight in the mmap specification.  (Thanks to Toshio
+    Endo for pointing out the problem.)
+  - Cleanup of linux_threads.c.  Some code was originally cloned from
+    irix_threads.c and now unnecessary.  Some comments were obviously wrong.
+  - (Mostly) fixed a longstanding problem with setting of dirty bits from
+    a signal handler.  In the presence of threads, dirty bits could get lost,
+    since the etting of a bit in the bit vector was not atomic with respect
+    to other updates.  The fix is 100% correct only for platforms for which
+    GC_test_and_set is defined.  The goal is to make that all platforms with
+    thread support.  Matters only if incremental GC and threads are both
+    enabled.
+  - made GC_all_interior_pointers (a.k.a. ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS) an
+    initialization time, instead of build-time option.  This is a 
+    nontrivial, high risk change.  It should slow down the code measurably
+    only if MERGE_SIZES is not defined, which is a very nonstandard
+    configuration.   
+  - Added doc/README.environment, and implemented what it describes.  This
+    allows a number of additional configuration options to be set through
+    the environment.  It documents a few previously undocumented options.
+  - Integrated Eric Benson's leak testing improvements.
+  - Removed the option to throw away the beginning of each page 
(DISCARD_WORDS).
+    This became less and less useful as processors enforce stricter alignment.
+    And it hadn't been tested in ages, and was thus probably broken anyway.
+ 
+ Since 6.0alpha6:
+  - Added GC_finalizer_notifier.  Fixed GC_finalize_on_demand.  (The variable
+    actually wasn't being tested at the right points.  The build-time flag
+    was.)
+  - Added Tom Tromey's S390 Linux patch.
+  - Added code to push GC_finalize_now in GC_push_finalizer_structures.
+    (Thanks to Matthew Flatt.)
+  - Added GC_push_gc_structures() to push all GC internal roots.
+  - Integrated some FreeBSD changes from Matthew Flatt.
+  - It looks like USRSTACK is not always correctly defined under Solaris.
+    Hacked gcconfig.h to attempt to work around the problem.  The result
+    is not well tested.  (Thanks again to Matthew Flatt for pointing this
+    out.  The gross hack is mine. - HB)
+  - Added Ji-Yong Chung's win32 threads and C++ fixes.
+  - Arranged for hpux_test_and_clear.s to no longer be needed or built.
+    It was causing build problems with gas, and it's not clear this is
+    better than the pthreads alternative on this platform.
+  - Some MINGW32 fixes from Hubert Garavel.
+  - Added Initial Hitachi SH4 port from Kaz Kojima.
+  - Ported thread-local allocation and parallel mark code to HP/UX on PA_RISC.
+  - Made include/gc_mark.h more public and separated out the really private
+    pieces.  This is probably still not quite sufficient for clients that
+    want to supply their own kind of type information.  But it's a start.
+    This involved lots of identifier renaming to make it namespace clean.
+  - Added GC_dont_precollect for clients that need complete control over
+    the root set.
+  - GC_is_visible didn't do the right thing with gcj objects.  (Not that
+    many people are likely to care, but ...)
+  - Don't redefine read with GC_USE_LD_WRAP.
+  - Initial port to LINUX/HP_PA.  Incremental collection and threads are not
+    yet supported.  (Incremental collection should work if you have the
+    right kernel.  Threads may work with a sufficiently patched pthread
+    library.)
+  - Changed gcconfig.h to recognize __i386__ as an alternative to i386 in
+    many places.  (Thanks to Benjamin Lerman.)
+  - Made win32_threads.c more tolerant of detaching a thread that it didn't
+    know about.  (Thanks to Paul Nash.)
+  - Added Makefile.am and configure.in from gcc to the distribution, with
+    minimal changes.  For the moment, those are just placeholders.  In the
+    future, we're planning to switch to a GNU-style build environment for
+    Un*x-like systems, though the old Makefile will remain as a backup.
+  - Turned off STUBBORN_ALLOC by default, and added it back as a Makefile
+    option.
+  - Redistributed some functions between malloc.c and mallocx.c, so that
+    simple statically linked apps no longer pull in mallocx.o.
+  - Changed large object allocation to clear the first and last few words
+    of each block before releassing the lock.  Otherwise the marker could see
+    objects with nonsensical type descriptors.
+  - Fixed a couple of subtle problems that could result in not recognizing
+    interior pointers from the stack.  (I believe these were introduced
+    in 6.0alpha6.)
+  - GC_debug_free_inner called GC_free, which tried to reacquire the
+    allocator lock, and hence deadlocked.  (DBG_HDRS_ALL probably never worked
+    with threads?)
+  - Fixed several problems with back traces.  Accidental references to a free
+    list could cause the free list pointer to be overwritten by a back pointer.
+    There seemed to be some problems with the encoding of root and finalizer
+    references.
+   
+ Since 6.0alpha7:
+  - Changed GC_debug_malloc_replacement and GC_debug_realloc_replacement
+    so that they compile under Irix.  (Thanks to Dave Love.)
+  - Updated powerpc_macosx_mach_dep.s so that it works if the collector
+    is in a dynamic library.  (Thanks to Andrew Begel.)
+  - Transformed README.debugging into debugging.html, updating and
+    expanding it in the process.  Added gcdescr.html and tree.html
+    from the web site to the GC distribution.
+  - Fixed several problems related to PRINT_BLACK_LIST. This involved
+    restructuring some of the marker macros.
+  - Fixed some problems with the sizing of objects with debug information.
+    Finalization was broken KEEP_BACK_PTRS or PRINT_BLACK_LIST.  Reduced the
+    object size with SHORT_DEBUG_HDRS by another word.
+  - The "Needed to allocate blacklisted ..." warning had inadvertently
+    been turned off by default, due to a buggy test in allchblk.c.  Turned
+    it back on.
+  - Removed the marker macros to deal with 2 pointers in interleaved fashion.
+    They were messy and the performance improvement seemed minimal.  We'll
+    leave such scheduling issues to the compiler.
+  - Changed Linux/PowerPC test to also check for __powerpc__ in response
+    to a discussion on the gcc mailing list.
+  - On Matthew Flatt's suggestion removed the "static" from the jmp_buf
+    declaration in GC_generic_push_regs.  This was causing problems in
+    systems that register all of their own roots.  It looks far more correct
+    to me without the "static" anyway. 
+  - Fixed several problems with thread local allocation of pointerfree or
+    typed objects.  The collector was reclaiming thread-local free lists, since
+    it wasn't following the link fields.
+  - There was apparently a long-standing race condition related to 
multithreaded
+    incremental collection.  A collection could be started and a thread stopped
+    between the memory unprotect system call and the setting of the
+    corresponding dirt bit.  I believe this did not affect Solaris or PCR, 
which
+    use a different dirty-bit implementation.  Fixed this by installing
+    signal handlers with sigaction instead of signal, and disabling the thread
+    suspend signal while in the write-protect handler.  (It is unclear
+    whether this scenario ever actually occurred.  I found it while tracking
+    down the following:)
+  - Incremental collection did not cooperate correctly with the PARALLEL_MARK
+    implementation of GC_malloc_many or the local_malloc primitves.  It still
+    doesn't work well, but it shouldn't lose memory anymore.
+  - Integrated some changes from the gcc source tree that I had previously
+    missed.  (Thanks to Bryce McKinley for the reminder/diff.)
+  - Added Makefile.direct as a copy of the default Makefile, which would
+    normally be overwritten if configure is run.
+  - Changed the gc.tar target in Makefile.direct to embed the version number
+    in the gc directory name.  This will affect future tar file distributions.
+  - Changed the Irix dynamic library finding code to no longer try to
+    eliminate writable text segments under Irix6.x, since that is probably no
+    longer necessary, and can apparently be unsafe on occasion.  (Thanks to
+    Shiro Kawai for pointing this out.)
+  - GC_cleanup with GC_DEBUG enabled passed a real object base address to
+    GC_debug_register_finalizer_ignore_self, which expected a pointer past the
+    debug header.  Call GC_register_finalizer_ignore_self instead, even with
+    debugging enabled.  (Thanks to Jean-Daniel Fekete for catching this.)
+  - The collector didn't build with call chain saving enabled but NARGS=0.
+    (Thanks to Maarten Thibaut.)
+  - Fixed up the GNU-style build files enough so that they work in some
+    obvious cases.
+  - Added initial port to Digital Mars compiler for win32. (Thanks to Walter
+    Bright.)
+ 
+ Since 6.0alpha8:
+  - added README.macros.
+  - Made gc.mak a symbolic link to work around winzip's tendency to ignore
+    hard links.
+  - Simplified the setting of NEED_FIND_LIMIT in os_dep.c, possibly breaking
+    it on untested platforms.
+  - Integrated initial GNU HURD port. (Thanks to Chris Lingard and Igor
+    Khavkine.)
+  - A few more fixes for Digital Mars compiler (Walter Bright).
+  - Fixed gcc version recognition.  Renamed OPERATOR_NEW_ARRAY to
+    GC_OPERATOR_NEW_ARRAY.  Changed GC_OPERATOR_NEW_ARRAY to be the default.
+    It can be overridden with -DGC_NO_OPERATOR_NEW_ARRAY.  (Thanks to
+    Cesar Eduardo Barros.) 
+  - Changed the byte size to free-list mapping in thread local allocation
+    so that size 0 allocations are handled correctly.
+  - Fixed Linux/MIPS stackbottom for new toolchain. (Thanks to Ryan Murray.)
+  - Changed finalization registration to invoke GC_oom_fn when it runs out
+    of memory.
+  - Removed lvalue cast in finalize.c.  This caused some debug configurations
+    not to build with some non-gcc compilers.
+ 
+ Since 6.0alpha9:
+  - Two more bug fixes for KEEP_BACK_PTRS and DBG_HDRS_ALL.
+  - Fixed a stack clearing problem that resulted in SIGILL with a
+    misaligned stack pointer for multithreaded SPARC builds.
+  - Integrated another HURD patch (thanks to Igor Khavkine).
+ 
+ Since 6.0:
+  - Non-debug, atomic allocations could result in bogus smashed object
+    reports with debugging on.  (Thanks to Patrick Doyle for the small
+    test case.)
+  - Fixed GC_get_register_stack_base (Itanium only) to work around a glibc
+    2.2.4 bug.
+  - Initial port to HP/UX on Itanium.  Thread support and both 32 and 64
+    bit ABIs appear to work.  Parallel mark support doesn't yet, due to
+    some inline assembly code issues.  Thread local allocation does appear
+    to work.
+  - ifdef'ed out glibc2.1/Itanium workaround.  I suspect nobody is using
+    that combination anymore.
+  - Added a patch to make new_gc_alloc.h usable with gcc3.0.  (Thanks to
+    Dimitris Vyzovitis for the patch.)
+  - Debugged 64-bit support on HP/UX PA-RISC.
+  - Turned on dynamic loading support for FreeBSD/ELF.  (Thanks to Peter
+    Housel.)
+  - Unregistering of finalizers with debugging allocation was broken.
+    (Thanks to Jani Kajala for the test case.)
+  - Old finalizers were not returned correctly from 
GC_debug_register_finalizer.
+  - Disabled MPROTECT_VDB for Linux/M68K based on a report that it doesn't 
work.
+  - Cleaned up some statistics gathering code in reclaim.c (Thanks to Walter
+    Bright.)
+  - Added some support for OpenBSD/ELF/Linux.  (Thanks to Suzuki Toshiya.)
+  - Added Jakub Jelinek's patch to use dl_iterate_phdr for dynamic library
+    traversal to dyn_load.c.  Changed it to weakly reference dl_iterate_phdr,
+    so that the old code is stilll used with old versions of glibc.
+  - Cleaned up feature test macros for various threads packages and
+    integrated (partially functional) FreeBSD threads code from Loren Rittle.
+    It's likely that the cleanup broke something, since it touched lots of
+    code.  It's also likelly that it fixed some unreported bugs in the
+    less common thread implementations, since some of the original code
+    didn't stand up to close scrutiny.  Support for the next pthreads
+    implementation should be easier to add.
+ 
+ Since 6.1alpha1:
+  - No longer wrap read by default in multithreaded applications.  It was
+    pointed out on the libgcj list that this holds the allocation lock for
+    way too long if the read blocks.  For now, reads into the heap are
+    broken with incremental collection.  It's possible to turn this back on
+    if you make sure that read calls don't block (e.g. by calling select
+    first).
+  - Fix ifdef in Solaris_threads.h to refer to GC_SOLARIS_THREADS.
+  - Added check for environment variable GC_IGNORE_GCJ_INFO.
+  - Added printing of stop-the-world GC times if GC_PRINT_STATS environment
+    variable is set.
+  - The calloc definition in leak_detector.h was missing parentheses, and
+    realloc was missing a second argument to GC_REALLOC.
+    (Thanks to Elrond (elrond<at>samba-tng.org).)
+  - Added GC_PRINT_BACK_HEIGHT environment variable and associated
+    code, mostly in the new file backgraph.c.  See doc/README.environment.
+  - Added -DUSE_GLOBAL_ALLOC to work around a Windows NT issue.  (Thanks to
+    Jonathan Clark.)
+  - Integrated port to NEC EWS4800 (MIPS-based workstation, with somewhat
+    different address-space layout). This may help for other machines with
+    holes in the data segment.  (Thanks to Hironori Sakamoto.)
+  - Changed the order in which GC_push_roots and friends push things onto
+    the mark stack.  GC_push_all calls need to come first, since we can't
+    necessarily recovere if those overflow the mark stack.  (Thanks to
+    Matthew Flatt for tracking down the problem.)
+  - Some minor cleanups to mostly support the Intel compiler on Linux/IA64.
+ 
+ Since 6.1 alpha2:
+  - Minor cleanup on the gcconfig.h section for SPARC.
+  - Minor fix to support Intel compiler for I386/Linux. (Thanks to Sven
+    Hartrumpf.)
+  - Added SPARC V9 (64-bit) support.  (Thanks to Jeff Sturm.)
+  - Restructured the way in which we determine whether or not to keep
+    call stacks for debug allocation.  By default SAVE_CALL_COUNT is
+    now zero on all platforms.  Added SAVE_CALL_NARGS parameters.
+    If possible, use execinfo.h to capture call stack.  (This should
+    add support for a number of new platforms, though often at
+    considerable runtime expense.)
+  - Try to print symbolic information for call stacks.  On Linux, we
+    do this with a combination of execinfo.h and running addr2line in
+    a separate process.  This is both much more expensive and much more
+    useful.  Amazingly, it seems to be fast enough for most purposes.
+  - Redefined strdup if -DREDIRECT_MALLOC is given.
+  - Changed incremental collector and MPROTECT_VDB implementation so that,
+    under favorable conditions, pointerfree objects are not protected.
+    Added GC_incremental_protection_needs() to determine ahead of time whether
+    pointerfree objects may be protected.  Replaced GC_write_hint() with
+    GC_remove_protection().
+  - Added test for GC_ENABLE_INCREMENTAL environment variable.
+  - Made GC_time_limit runtime configurable.  Added GC_PAUSE_TIME_TARGET
+    environment variable.
+  - Eliminated GC_page_sz, a duplicate of GC_page_size.
+  - Caused the Solaris and Irix thread creation primitives to call
+    GC_init_inner().
+  
+ Since 6.1alpha3:
+  - Fixed typo in sparc_mach_dep.S, preventing the 64-bit version from
+    building.  Increased 64-bit heap size limit in test.c slightly, since
+    a functional SPARC collector seems to slightly exceed the old limits.
+    (Thanks again to Jeff Sturm.)
+  - Use NPRGREG in solaris_threads.c, thus printing all registers if things
+    go wrong.
+  - Added GC_MARKERS environment variable to allow use of a single marker
+    thread on an MP without confusing the lock implementation.
+  - Collect much less aggressively in incremental mode with GC_TIME_UNLIMITED.
+    This is really a purely generational mode, and we can afford to 
+    postpone the collection until the heap is (nearly) full.
+  - Remove read() wrapper for MPROTECT_VDB.  It was causing more harm than
+    good.  It is often no longer needed if system calls avoid writing to
+    pointerfull heap objects.
+  - Fix MACOSX test in gcconfig.h. (Thanks to John Clements.)
+  - Change GC_test_and_set so that it consistently has one argument.
+    Add spaces to ::: in powerpc assembly code in gc_locks.h.
+    (Thanks to Ryan Murray.)
+  - Fixed a formatting error in dbg_mlc.c.  Added prototype to GC_abort()
+    declaration.   (Thanks to Michael Smith.)
+  - Removed "source" argument to GC_find_start().  Eliminate GC_FIND_START().
+  - Added win32 recognition code in configure.in.  Changed some of the
+    dllimport/export defines in gc.h.  (Thanks to Adam Megacz.)
+  - GC_malloc_many didn't set hb_last_reclaimed when it called 
+    GC_reclaim_generic.  (I'm not sure this matters much, but ...)
+  - Allocating uncollectable objects with debug information sometimes
+    allocated objects that were one byte too small, since uncollectable
+    objects don't have the extra byte added at the end.  (Thanks to
+    Wink Saville for pointing this out.)
+  - Added a bit more assertion checking to make sure that gcj objects
+    on free lists never have a nonzero second word.
+  - Replaced BCC_MAKEFILE with an up-to-date one.  (Thanks to 
+    Andre Leiradella.)
+  - Upgraded libtool, cinfigure.in and some related files to hopefully
+    support NetBSD/SPARC.  (Thanks to Adrian Bunk.)  Unfortunately,
+    libtool 1.4.2 seemed to be buggy due to missing quotes in several
+    "test" invocations.  Fixed those in the ltmain.sh script.
+  - Some win32-specific patches, including the introduction of
+    GC_CreateThread.  (Thanks to Adam Megacz.)
+  - Merged in gcj changes from Anthony Green to support embedded systems.
+  - Tried to consistently rename preprocessed assembly files with a capital
+    .S extension.
+  - Use alpha_mach_dep.S on ALPHA again.  It doesn't really matter, but this
+    makes our distribution consistent with the gcc one, avoiding future merge
+    problems.
+  - Move GET_MEM definition into gcconfig.h.  Include gcconfig.h slightly
+    later in gc_priv.h to avoid forward references to ptr_t.
+  - Add some testing of local allocation to test.c.
+  - Change definition of INVALID_QTID in specific.h.  The -1 value was used
+    inconsistently, and too likely to collide with a valid stack address.
+    Some general clean-up of specific.[ch].  Added assertions.  (Thanks
+    to Michael Smith for tracking down an intermittent bug to this
+    general area.  I'm not sure it has been squashed yet, however.)
+  - On Pthread systems it was not safe to call GC_malloc() between fork()
+    and exec().  According to the applicable standards, it doesn't appear
+    to be safe to call malloc() or many other libc functions either, thus
+    it's not clear this is fixable.  Added experimental support for
+    -DHANDLE_FORK in linux_threads.c which tries to support it.  It may
+    succeed if libc does the right thing.  I'm not sure whether it does.
+    (Thanks to Kenneth Schalk for pointing out this issue.)
+  - Documented thread local allocation primitives to require an
+    explicit GC_init call.  GC_init_parallel is no longer declared to
+    be a constructor function, since that isn't portable and often
+    seems to lead to initialization order problems.
+  - Changed gc_cpp.cc and gc_cpp.h in one more attempt to make them
+    compatible with Visual C++ 6.  (Thanks to Wink Saville for the
+    patch.)
+  - Some more patches for Linux on HP PA-RISC.
+  - Added include/gc_allocator.h.  It implements (hopefully) standard
+    conforming (as opposed to SGI-style) allocators that allocate
+    collectable (gc_allocator) or GC-traceable, but not collectable
+    (traceable_allocator) objects.  This borrows heavily from libstc++,
+    which borrows heavily from the SGI implementation, this part of
+    which was written by Matt Austern.  Changed test_cpp.cc to very
+    minimally test this.
+  - On Linux/X86, retry mmap with a different start argument.  That should
+    allow the collector to use more (closer to 3GB) of the address space.
+    (Thanks to Jeffrey Mark Siskind for tracking this down.)
+  - Force 64 bit alignment with GCJ support.  (Reflects Bryce McKinley's
+    patch to the gcc tree.)
+  - Refined the choice of sa_handler vs. sa_sigaction in GC_dirty_init
+    to accomodate some glibc5 systems.  (Thanks to Dan Fandrich for the
+    patch.)
+  - Compensated for the fact that current versions of glibc set
+    __libc_stack_end incorrectly on Linux/IA64 while initialization code
+    is running.  This could cause the collector to miss 16 bytes of
+    the memory stack if GC_malloc or friends where called before main().
+  - Mostly integrated Takis Psarogiannakopoulos' port to DG/UX Inix 86.
+    This will probably take another iteration to work, since his
+    patch conflicted with the libtool upgrade. 
+  - Added README.arm.cross containing some information about cross-
+    compiling to an ARM processor from Margaret Fleck.
+ 
+ Since 6.1alpha4:
+  - Added GC_finalizer_mem_freed, and changed some of the code that
+    decided on heap expansion to look at it.  Memory explicitly
+    deallocated by finalizers essentially needs to be counted as reclaimed
+    by the GC.  Otherwise there are cases in which the heap can grow
+    unboundedly.  (Thanks to Mark Reichert for the test case.)
+  - Integrated Adam Megacz patches to not scan dynamic libraries if
+    we are compiling with gcc on win32.  Otherwise we need structured
+    exception handling to deal with asynchronously unmapped root
+    segments, and gcc doesn't directly support that.
+  - Integrated Anthony Green's patch to support Wine.
+  - GC_OPERATOR_NEW_ARRAY was misspelled OPERATOR_NEW_ARRAY in several
+    places, including gc_cpp.cc.  (Thanks to Wink Saville for pointing
+    this out.)
+  - Integrated Loren James Rittle's Alpha FreeBSD patches.  In
+    response to Richard Henderson's suggestion, these also
+    changed the declarations of symbols like _end on many platforms to
+    that they wouldn't mistakenly be declared as short data symbols.
+  - Integrated changes from the Debian distribution.  (Thanks to Ryan Murray
+    for pointing these out.)  Fix C++ comments in POWERPC port.  Add ARM32
+    incremental GC support.  Get rid of USE_GENERIC_PUSH_REGS for alpha/Linux,
+    this time for real.  Use va_copy to get rid of cord printf problems
+    (finally).
+  - Close file descriptor used to count cpus.  Thanks to Jeff Sturm for
+    pointing out the omission.
+  - Don't just drop gcj free lists in GC_start_reclaim, since that can
+    eventually cause the marker to see a bogus mark descriptor in the 
+    dropped objects.  The usual symptom was a very intermittent segmentation
+    fault in the marker.  This mattered only if one of the GC_gcj_malloc
+    variants was used.  (Thanks to Michael Smith, Jeff Sturm, Bryce
+    McKinley and Tom Tromey for helping to track this down.)
+  - Fixed Linux and Solaris/64 SPARC configuration.  (Thanks to David Miller,
+    Jeff Sturm, Tom Tromey, and Christian Joensson.)
+  - Fixed a typo in strdup definition.  (Thanks to Gerard A Allan.)
+  - Changed Makefile.direct to invoke $(CC) to assemble alpha_mach_dep.S.
+    This is needed on Linux.  I'm not sure whether it's better or worse
+    on Tru64.
+  - Changed gc_cpp.h once more to declare operator new and friends only in
+    a Microsoft environment.  This may need further fine tuning.  (Thanks to
+    Johannes Schmidt for pointing out that the older code breaks on gcc3.0.4.)
+  - Don't ever override strdup if it's already macro defined.  (Thanks to
+    Adnan Ali for pointing out the problem.)
+  - Changed gc_cpp.h yet again to also overload placement new.  Due to the
+    C++ overloading rules, the other overloaded new operations otherwise hide
+    placement new, which causes many STL uses to break.  (Thanks to Reza
+    Shahidi for reporting this, and to Matt Austern for proposing a fix.)
+  - Integrated cygwin pthreads support from Dan Bonachea.
+  - Turn on DYNAMIC_LOADING for NetBSD.  (Thanks to Krister Walfridsson.)
+  - Changed printing code to print more complete GC times.
+  - Applied Mark Mitchell's Irix patch to correct some bitrot.
+  - Clarified which object-printing routines in dbg_mlc.c should hold
+    the allocation lock.  Restructured the code to allow reasonable object
+    printing with -DREDIRECT_MALLOC.
+  - Fix the Linux mmap code to always start with 0x1000 as the initial hint.
+    Minor patches for 64-bit AIX, particularly to STACKBOTTOM.
+    (Thanks again to Jeffrey Mark Siskind.)
+  - Renamed "SUSPENDED" flag for Solaris threads support to avoid a conflict
+    with a system header. (Thanks to Philp Brown.)
+  - Cause win32_threads.c to handle an out of range stack pointer correctly,
+    though currently with a warning.  (Thanks to Jonathan Clark for
+    observing that win32 applications may temporarily use the stack
+    pointer for other purposes, and suggesting a fix.  Unfortunately, it's
+    not clear that there is a complete solution to this problem.)
+ 
+ Since 6.1alpha5:
+  - Added GC_MAXIMUM_HEAP_SIZE environment variable.
+  - Fix configure.in for MIPS/LINUX. (Thanks to H.J. Lu.)
+  - Double page hash table size for -DLARGE_CONFIG.
+  - Integrated Bo Thorsen's X86-64 support.
+  - STACKBOTTOM definition for LINUX/MIPS was partially changed back.
+    (Thanks to H.J. Lu and Hiroshi Kawashima for resolving this.)
+  - Replaced all occurrences of LINUX_DATA_START in gcconfig.h with
+    SEARCH_FOR_DATA_START.  It doesn't hurt to falll back to a search.
+    And __data_start doesn't seem to get defined correctly of the GC
+    library is loaded with LD_PRELOAD, e.g. for leak detection.
+  - If the GC_find_leak environment variable is set, do a
+    atexit(GC_gcollect) to give us at least one chance to detect leaks.
+    This may report some very benign leaks, but ...
+  - Addeded REDIRECT_FREE.  It's necessary if we want leak detection with
+    LD_PRELOAD.
+  - Defer printing of leaked objects, as for smashed objects.
+  - Fixed process and descriptor leak in GC_print_callers.  Try for
+    line number even if we got function name.)
+  - Ported parallel GC support and thread local allocation to Alpha.
+    Not yet well-tested.
+  - Added GC_DUMP_REGULARLY and added finalization statistics to GC_dump().
+  - Fixed Makefile.am to mention alpha_mach_dep.S instead of the defunct
+    alpha_mach_dep.s.  (Thanks to Fergus Henderson.)
+  - Incorporated a change to new_gc_alloc.h, suggested by Johannes Schmidt,
+    which should make it work with gcc3.1.  (I would still like to encourage
+    use of gc_allocator.h instead.) 
+  - Use alpha_mach_dep.S only on Linux.  (It's not clear that this is
+    optimal, but it otherwise didn't build on Tru64.  Thanks to Fergus
+    Henderson.)
+  - Added ifdef to guard free() in os_dep.c.  Otherwise we get a
+    compilation error on Irix.  (Thanks to Dai Sato.)
+  - Added an experimental version of GC_memalign to mallocx.c.  This can't
+    always work, since we don't handle alignment requests in the hblk-level
+    allocator, and we can't handle arbitrary pointer displacements unless
+    GC_all_interior_pointers is enabled.  But it should work for alignment
+    requests up to HBLKSIZE.  This is not yet documented in the standard
+    places.
+  - Finally debugged the OSF1/Tru64 thread support.  This needs more testing,
+    since I needed to add a somewhat unconvincing workaround for signal
+    delivery issues that I don't yet completely understand.  But it does
+    pass my tests, even in parallel GC mode.  Incremental GC support is
+    disabled if thread support is enabled, due to the signal issues.
+  - Eliminated name-space-incorrect definition of _cdecl from gc_cpp.h.
+  - Added GC_debug_malloc_replacement and GC_debug_realloc_replacement
+    declarations to gc.h.  On IA64, this is required for REDIRECT_MALLOC
+    to work correctly with these.
+  - Fixed Linux USE_PROC_FOR_LIBRARIES to work with a 64-bit /proc format.
+ 
+ Since 6.1:
+  - Guard the test for GC_DUMP_REGULARLY in misc.c with
+    "#ifndef NO_DEBUGGING".  Otherwise it fails to build with NO_DEBUGGING
+    defined.  (Thanks to Manuel Serrano.)
+  - Message about retrying suspend signals was incorrectly generated even when
+    flag was not set.
+  - Cleaned up MACOSX/NEXT root registration code.  There was apparently a
+    separate ifdef case in GC_register_data_segments() for no reason.
+  - Removed MPROTECT_VDB for MACOSX port, based on one negative report.
+  - Arrange for gc.h and friends to be correctly installed with GNU-style
+    "make install".
+  - Enable the GNU-style build facility include C++ support in the library
+    with --enable-cplusplus. (Thanks to Thomas Maier for some of the patch.)
+  - Mark from GC_thread_key in linux_threads.c, in case that's allocated
+    from the garbage collected heap, as it is with our own thread-specific
+    storage implementation.  (Thanks to Jeff Sturm.)
+  - Mark all free list header blocks if they are heap allocated.  This avoids
+    some unnecessary tracing.  And it remains correct if we clear the
+    root set. (Thanks to Jeff Sturm for identifying the bug.)
+  - Improved S390/Linux support.  Add S390/Linux 64-bit support.  (Thanks
+    to Ulrich Weigand.)
+  - Corrected the spelling of GC_{M,C}ALLOC_EXPLICTLY_TYPED to
+    GC_{M,C}ALLOC_EXPLICITLY_TYPED in gc_typed.h.  This is technically
+    an interface change.  Based on the fact that nobody reported this,
+    I suspect/hope there were no clients.
+  - Cleaned up gc_typed.h so that (1) it adds an extern "C" declaration
+    when appropriate, (2) doesn't generate references to undefined internal
+    macros, and (3) allows easier manual construction of descriptors.
+  - Close the file descriptor used by GC_print_address_map().
+  - Set the "close-on-exec" bit for various file descriptors maintained
+    for the collector's internal use.
+  - Added a hack to find memory segments owned by the system allocator
+    under win32.  Based on my tests, this tends to eventually find all
+    segments, though it may take a while.  There appear to be cleaner,
+    but slower solutions under NT/XP.  But they rely on an API that's
+    unsupported under 9X.
+  - Changed Linux PowerPC stack finding to LINUX_STACKBOTTOM.  (Thanks
+    to Akira Tagoh for pointing out that HEURISTIC1 doesn't work on
+    64-bit kernels.)
+  - Added GC_set_free_space_divisor to avoid some Windows dll issues.
+  - Added FIXUP_POINTER, POINTER_SHIFT, POINTER_MASK to allow preprocessing
+    of candidate pointers for tagging, etc.
+  - Always lock around GC_notify_full_gc().  Simplified code for
+    invoking GC_notify_full_gc().
+  - Changed the way DATASTART is defined on FreeBSD to be robust against
+    an unmapped page after etext.  (Thanks to Hironori Sakamoto for
+    tracking down the intermittent failure.)
+  - Made GC_enable() and GC_disable() official.  Deprecated direct update
+    of GC_dont_gc.  Changed GC_gcollect to be a noop when garbage collection
+    is disabled.
+  - Call GC_register_dynamic_libraries before stopping the world on Linux,
+    in order to avoid a potential deadlock due to the dl_iterate_phdr lock.
+  - Introduced a more general mechanism for platform-dependent code to
+    decide whether the main data segment should be handled separately
+    from dynamic libraries, or registered by GC_register_dynamic_libraries.
+    The latter is more reliable and easier on Linux with dl_iterate_phdr. 
+ 
+ Since 6.2alpha1:
+  - Fixed the completely broken FreeBSD code in 6.2alpha1.  (Thanks to
+    Hironori Sakamoto for the patch.)
+  - Changed IRIX reference in dbg_mlc.c to IRIX5. (Thanks to Marcus Herbert.)
+  - Attempted to work around the problems with .S filenames and the SGI
+    compiler.  (Reported by several people. Untested.)
+  - Worked around an HP/UX make issue with the GNU-style build process.
+  - Fixed the --enable-cplusplus build machinery to allow builds without
+    a C++ compiler.  (That was always the intent ...)
+  - Changed the debugging allocation macros to explicitly pass the return
+    address for Linux and XXXBSD on hardware for which we can't get stack
+    traces.  Use __builtin_return_address(0) to generate it when possible.
+    Some of the configuration work was cleaned up (good) and moved to gc.h
+    (bad, but necessary).  This should make leak detection more useful
+    on a number of platforms.  (Thanks to Fabian Thylman for the suggestion.)
+  - Fixed compilation problems in dbg_mlc.c with GC_ADD_CALLER.
+  - Bumped revision number for dynamic library.
+ 
+ Since 6.2alpha2:
+  - Don't include execinfo.h in os_dep.c when it's not needed, and may not 
exist.
+ 
+ Since 6.2alpha3:
+  - Use LINUX_STACKBOTTOM for >= glibc2.2 on Linux/MIPS.  (See Debian bug
+    # 177204)
+  - Integrated Jeff Sturm and Jesse Rosenstock's MACOSX threads patches.
+  - Integrated Grzegorz Jakacki's substantial GNU build patch.  "Make dist"
+    should now work for the GNU build process.  Documentation files
+    are installed under share/gc.
+  - Tweaked gc_cpp.h to again support the Borland compiler.  (Thanks to
+    Rene Girard for pointing out the problems.)
+  - Updated BCC_MAKEFILE (thanks to Rene Girard).
+  - Added GC_ASSERT check for minimum thread stack size.
+  - Added --enable-gc-assertions.
+  - Added some web documentation to the distribution.  Updated it in the
+    process.
+  - Separate gc_conf_macros.h from gc.h.
+  - Added generic GC_THREADS client-defined macro to set the appropriate
+    GC_XXX_THREADS internal macro.  (gc_config_macros.h.)
+  - Add debugging versions of _ignore_off_page allocation primitves.
+  - Moved declarations of GC_make_closure and GC_debug_invoke_finalizer
+    from gc.h to gc_priv.h.
+  - Reset GC_fail_count even if only a small allocation succeeds.
+  - Integrated Brian Alliet's patch for dynamic library support on Darwin.
+  - gc_cpp.h's gc_cleanup destructor called GC_REGISTER_FINALIZER_IGNORE_SELF
+    when it should have called the lower case version, since it was
+    explicitly computing a base pointer.
+ 
+ Since 6.2alpha4:
+  - GC_invoke_finalizers could, under rare conditions, set
+    GC_finalizer_mem_freed to an essentially random value.  This could
+    possibly cause unbounded heap growth for long-running applications
+    under some conditions.  (The bug was introduced in 6.1alpha5, and
+    is not in gcc3.3.  Thanks to Ben Hutchings for finding it.)
+  - Attempted to sanitize the various DLL macros.  GC_USE_DLL disappeared.
+    GC_DLL is used instead.  All internal tests are now on GC_DLL.
+    README.macros is now more precise about the intended meaning.
+  - Include DllMain in the multithreaded win32 version only if the
+    collector is actually built as a dll.  (Thanks to Mohan Embar for
+    a version of the patch.)
+  - Hide the cygwin threadAttach/Detach functions.  They were violating our
+    namespace rules.  
+  - Fixed an assertion in GC_check_heap_proc.  Added GC_STATIC_ASSERT.
+    (Thanks again to Ben Hutchings.)
+  - Removed some obsolete definitions for Linux/PowerPC in gcconfig.h.
+  - CORD_cat was not rebalancing unbalanced trees in some cases, violating
+    a CORD invariant.  Also tweaked the rebalancing rule for
+    CORD_cat_char_star.  (Thanks to Alexandr Petrosian for the bug report
+    and patch.)
+  - Added hand-coded structured exception handling support to mark.c.
+    This should enable support of dynamic libraries under win32 with
+    gcc-compiled code.  (Thanks to Ranjit Mathew for the patch.)
+    Turned on dynamic library scanning for win32/gcc.
+  - Removed some remnants of read wrapping.  (Thanks to Kenneth Schalk.)
+    GC_USE_LD_WRAP ws probably broken in recent versions.
+  - The build could fail on some platforms since gcconfig.h could include
+    declarations mentioning ptr_t, which was not defined, e.g. when if_mach
+    was built.  (Thanks to Yann Dirson for pointing this out.)  Also
+    cleaned up tests for GC_PRIVATE_H in gcconfig.h a bit. 
+  - The GC_LOOP_ON_ABORT environment variable interfered with incremental
+    collection, since the write fault handler was erroneously overridden.
+    Handlers are now set up in the correct order.
+  - It used to be possible to call GC_mark_thread_local_free_lists() while
+    the world was not stopped during an incremental GC.  This was not safe.
+    Fortunately, it was also unnecessary.  Added GC_world_stopped flag
+    to avoid it.  (This caused occasional crashes in GC_set_fl_marks
+    with thread local allocation and incremental GC.  This probably happened
+    primarily on old, slow multiprocessors.)
+  - Allowed overriding of MAX_THREADS in win32_threads.c from the build
+    command line.  (Patch from Yannis Bres.)
+  - Taught the IA64/linux code to determine the register backing store base 
from
+    /proc/self/maps after checking the __libc symbol, but before guessing.
+    (__libc symbols are on the endangered list, and the guess is likely to not
+    always be right for 2.6 kernels.)  Restructured the code to read and parse
+    /proc/self/maps so it only exists in one place (all platforms).
+  - The -DUSE_PROC_FOR_LIBRARIES code was broken on Linux.  It claimed that it
+    also registered the main data segment, but didn't actually do so.  (I don't
+    think anyone actually uses this configuration, but ...)
+  - Made another attempt to get --enablecplusplus to do the right thing.
+    Since there are unavoidable problems with C programs linking against a
+    dynamic library that includes C++ code, I separated out the c++ code into
+    libgccpp.
+ 
+ Since 6.2alpha5:
+  - There was extra underscore in the name of GC_save_registers_in_stack
+    for NetBSD/SPARC.  (Thanks to Jaap Boender for the patch.)
+  - Integrated Brian Alliet's patch for Darwin.  This restructured the
+    linuxthreads/pthreads support to separate generic pthreads support
+    from more the system-dependent thread-stopping code.  I believe this
+    should make it easier to eliminate the code duplication between
+    pthreads platforms in the future.  The patch included some other
+    code cleanups.
+  - Integrated Dan Bonachea's patch to support AIX threads.  This required
+    substantial manual integration, mostly due to conflicts with other
+    recent threads changes.  It may take another iteration to
+    get it to work.
+  - Removed HPUX/PA-RISC support from aix_irix_threads.c.  It wasn't used
+    anyway and it cluttered up the code.  And anything we can do to migrate
+    towards generic pthreads support is a good thing.
+  - Added a more explicit test for tracing of function arguments to test.c.
+    (Thanks to Dan Grayson.)
+  - Added Akira Tagoh's PowerPC64 patch.
+  - Fixed some bit rot in the Cygwin port.  (Thanks to Dan Bonachea for
+    pointing it out.)  Gc.h now includes just windows.h, not winbase.h.
+  - Declared GC_save_regs_in_stack() in gc_priv.h.  Remove other declarations.
+  - Changed --enable-cplusplus to use automake consitionals.  The old way
+    confused libtool.  "Make install" didn't work correctly for the old 
version.
+    Previously --enable-cplusplus was broken on cygwin.
+  - Changed the C version of GC_push_regs to fail at compile time if it is
+    generated with an empty body.  This seems to have been the cause of one
+    or two subtle failures on unusual platforms.  Those failures should
+    now occur at build time and be easily fixable.
+     
+ 
+ To do:
+  - A dynamic libgc.so references dlopen unconditionally, but doesn't link
+    against libdl.
+  - GC_proc_fd for Solaris is not correctly updated in response to a
+    fork() call.  Thus incremental collection in the child won't work
+    correctly.  (Thanks to Ben Cottrell for pointing this out.)
+  - --enable-redirect-malloc is mostly untested and known not to work
+    on some platforms. 
+  - There seem to be outstanding issues on Solaris/X86, possibly with
+    finding the data segment starting address.  Information/patches would
+    be appreciated.
+  - Very large root set sizes (> 16 MB or so) could cause the collector
+    to abort with an unexpected mark stack overflow.  (Thanks again to
+    Peter Chubb.)  NOT YET FIXED.  Workaround is to increase the initial
+    size.
+  - The SGI version of the collector marks from mmapped pages, even
+    if they are not part of dynamic library static data areas.  This
+    causes performance problems with some SGI libraries that use mmap
+    as a bitmap allocator.  NOT YET FIXED.  It may be possible to turn
+    off DYNAMIC_LOADING in the collector as a workaround.  It may also
+    be possible to conditionally intercept mmap and use 
GC_exclude_static_roots.
+    The real fix is to walk rld data structures, which looks possible.
+  - Incremental collector should handle large objects better.  Currently,
+    it looks like the whole object is treated as dirty if any part of it
+    is.
+  




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