NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/sys/mips/875

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-14 | 1.2 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken!snll-arpagw!hilary
From: [e-mail] (Hilary Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Problem with malloc?
Summary: It gives a segment violation sometimes.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 13 Aug 92 23:38:40 GMT
Distribution: all
Organization: Sandia National Labs, Livermore, CA
Lines: 15

I have a problem with malloc().  The code I am running makes many calls
to malloc for small amounts of memory at a time.  [Actually the program
is calling calloc, but I think I have isolated the problem to malloc().]
By "many calls" I means perhaps 20 or 100.  The amounts of memory range
from 4 bytes to several hundred.  There is never much memory allocated
at any one time before it all gets returned.  Every now and then, the
program aborts with a segment violation.  The problem is not repeatable;
if I rerun the program from scratch, the problem might not occur, or it
might occur at a different call to malloc.

Has anybody seen this problem?  Is there a fix?  I am running RISC/os 4.51
on an RS2030.  For what it's worth, my disk isn't very reliable -- but I
have never seen a diagnostic when this problem occurs.

Hilary