bug#40661: Crash in regex search during redisplay

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Copley <rcopley@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2020 19:30:29 +0100
> Cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, Daniel Colascione 
> <dancol@dancol.org>, 40661@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> I have a little worry about the situation where the procedure of doing
> a "decoding" entails a regexp buffer search. (I can't make out whether
> or not "decoding" means executing arbitrary Lisp code.)

This can happen if the coding-system has a post-read-conversion
attribute, yes.

> Is it possible, with your patch, that we might re-enable buffer
> shrinking sooner than desirable?

I don't think I understand the scenario you have in mind.  If decoding
calls regexp search, then we inhibit shrinking inside the regex
routines, not outside of them.  Which code will re-enable shrinking
before the regex routines return?

> (This is reiterating a worry you yourself mentioned earlier, "I'm
> not sure we want to conflate these two purposes".)

coding.c uses this flag only while it runs purely C code.  Lisp cannot
run at that point.  If a coding-system has a post-read-conversion, it
will run only after the C decoder finishes.

> In the comment, you mention relocation as well as shrinking.

It's the relocation that causes the crash, because following the
relocation we unmap a portion of the process memory, where previously
we had buffer text, from the process's address space.  Shrinking of
the gap is what triggers the relocation (when the original gap was
very large).

> Does it make sense to combine this new guard with the existing
> freeze_buffer_relocation in some way?

I thought about that, but decided against it, for two reasons.  First,
freeze_buffer_relocation should at some point go away: it is not a
no-op only in an Emacs that uses ralloc.c, which currently only the
MS-DOS build does, AFAIK.  And second, it freezes relocation at a
higher level than needed, above the re_match_2_internal function which
is the only one that can call Lisp.