Re: Emacs crashes

[Chong Yidong]

Nick Roberts <address@hidden> writes:

> I've had Emacs crash/hang in three different ways in recent days.  It would
> appear to be less stable than it was two years ago:
>
> 1) It hangs with some kind of mutex lock which I don't understand with a brief
>    backtrace of three functions in libc, I think.  The only thing I can do,
>    after attaching with GDB, is kill it.
>
> 2) A garbage collection related crash where mark_object is called recursively 
>    literally thousands of times,

Kim Storm reported some similar crashes around the beginning of March.
Unfortunately, the only big change landed to the src/ directory around
that time was my x_catch_errors change to avoid using
record_unwind_protect.  I've gone over those changes several times,
but no luck: I don't see how they can possbily lead to garbage
collection bugs.

The only possibility I can think of is the change to struct
specbinding and specpdl_ptr to make them non-volatile, which is
supposedly OK since record_unwind_protect can no longer be called in a
signal handler.  Could that lead to problems elsewhere in Emacs?

(The only other big checkin during that period was Luc's
load-file-rep-suffixes change, but that's even less likely to be the
caused.)