This is a problem which perhaps should be put in the
AlphaLinux FAQ. Excuse if it perhaps was discussed already.
I observed that XEmacs crashed apparently doing certain
regexp matches. I got to extract a BibTeX record which
crashes XEmacs safely.
A similar, perhaps the same problem has been observed
for XEmacs under OSF/1, which has only a 2MB stack.
As one XEmacs maintainer commented: "Please check the
ulimits for your stacksize. There seems to be a trend
on 64-bit OS to set it ridiculously low."
Although it is not confirmed completely, the problem
really seems to be a stack overflow, because if I increase
the stack limit XEmacs runs as always. (The standard stack
size limit for my distribution is 8MB.) The problem may be
triggered by the use of the alloca() function in the XEmacs
regexp matching code.
Other people have observed similar problems under Alpha Linux
with different software.
The quick check is to become root, issue
ulimit -s 32768
(or whatever value in kB), su to a user shell and start the
program in question again.
To get higher limits by default, it seems necessary to write them
in /etc/security/limits.conf, and also to set them with
the ulimit shell command in the startup scripts for the
daemons like sshd or atd. Stack limits are inherited by
the parent processes and so each parent daemon has to
be restarted.
If my assumption matches the true cause for the problem,
it would seem reasonable that distributors increase stack
size limits for the alpha.
Would you agree about this ? Why might a program need more
stack when running on the alpha?
Johannes
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