[oi-dev] libmapmalloc and libumem

[Toomas Soome]

> On 8. Aug 2021, at 11:46, stes at PANDORA.BE <stes at telenet.be> wrote:
> 
> 
> When I compiled OpenSmalltalk on OpenIndiana, initially it seemed to work but there were sometimes malloc() errors, pointing to some form of memory corruption.
> 
> The names of the OpenSmalltalk packages are cog-spur and stack-spur.
> 
> Those are also the names that the principal developer of OpenSmalltalk (Eliot Miranda) also uses.
> 
> Both cog-spur and stack-spur were sometimes working fine for a while, then crashing either without error message or with some malloc error.
> 
> I ran cog-spur and stack-spur under valgrind, a tool to debug malloc, but valgrind did not find a problem.
> 
> Fortunately I discovered a while ago that OpenIndiana has multiple malloc() libraries.
> 
> Since I link against libmapmalloc, a malloc() implementation that only uses mmap() and not brk() or sbrk() , the situation is much better.
> 
> The packages are now much more stable and I have not seen a malloc() error any longer although that these are hard to reproduce problems.
> 
> Perhaps I should be using libumem instead of libmapmalloc.
> 
> Has anyone recommendations on perhaps preference for libumem on OI instead of libmapmalloc ?
> 
> David Stes

libumem does provide more tools to diagnose memory management issues.

rgds,
toomas