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GC and stack marking
From: |
Eli Zaretskii |
Subject: |
GC and stack marking |
Date: |
Mon, 19 May 2014 19:31:46 +0300 |
I have a question regarding GC and stack marking.
This issue popped up during testing of the new code written by Fabrice
for managing Emacs memory on MS-Windows. I don't think this issue is
Windows specific, and I don't think the details of the new
implementation matter for what I'm about to ask (but if someone wants
the gory details, please holler).
The short version of the question is: is it possible that a Lisp
object which is no longer referenced by anything won't be GC'ed
because it is marked by mark_stack due to some kind of coincidence?
The specific situation where I think I see something like this is
during dumping. When temacs loads and runs loadup.el, it does this
near the beginning:
(if (eq t purify-flag)
(setq purify-flag (make-hash-table :test 'equal :size 70000)))
This creates a large hash-table and stores its reference in
purify-flag. Then, after loading all the preloaded packages, temacs
does this:
;; Avoid error if user loads some more libraries now and make sure the
;; hash-consing hash table is GC'd.
(setq purify-flag nil)
(if (null (garbage-collect))
(setq pure-space-overflow t))
Note the comment: "...and make sure the hash-consing hash table is
GC'd.". Well, on one machine to which I have access, it isn't GC'd.
Why? because mark_stack happens to find its address somewhere on the
stack. (I have a backtrace to prove it.) So the huge hash-table gets
dumped into the emacs executable, and causes all kinds of trouble in
the dumped Emacs.
On another machine (with a different version of the OS and of GCC),
the problem doesn't happen, and the table is indeed GC'd.
My question is: is this a legitimate situation? Since all mark_stack
does is look for values recorded in the red-black tree, it might find
such a value by sheer luck (or lack thereof). Right? Or is this a
bug that needs to be researched further?
If this can legitimately happen, then how can we make sure this
hash-table indeed gets GC'd before we dump Emacs?
TIA
- GC and stack marking,
Eli Zaretskii <=
Re: GC and stack marking, Stefan Monnier, 2014/05/20