Perl /Tk Test errors on Solaris 10 with perl-5.8.8

[Peter Edwards]

>Digging deeper has revealed the the code is core dumping and examination of
>the core shows that is occuring during memory operations

Yike. Sounds like linking with a safer malloc() is a good plan!

>From Perl man page
http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.8/README.solaris#Malloc_Issues_with
_perl_on_Solaris.
"Starting from perl 5.7.1 perl uses the Solaris malloc, since the perl
malloc breaks when dealing with more than 2GB of memory, and the Solaris
malloc also seems to be faster."

"If you for some reason (such as binary backward compatibility) really need
to use perl's malloc, you can rebuild perl from the sources and Configure
the build with"

 $ sh Configure -Dusemymalloc

"You should not use perl's malloc if you are building with gcc. There are
reports of core dumps, especially in the PDL module. The problem appears to
go away under -DDEBUGGING, so it has been difficult to track down. Sun's
compiler appears to be okay with or without perl's malloc. [XXX further
investigation is needed here.]"


Sounds scary ;-)

I'm not sure if you're using Sun Studio C or GNU C but this library looks
worth a shot to debug the problem:
http://dmalloc.com/

A quick search threw up a few thread-safety type issues
http://steubentech.com/~talon/dlmalloc.html
http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Sun_Studio_FAQs#OpenMP_-_Why_can.27t_m
y_loops_have_MT-safe_functions.3F

Regards, Peter
www.dragonstaff.com