On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 10:29:40PM +0800, some SMTP stream spewed forth:
> I am running -CURRENT as of 2001/01/31 12:00, more or less uneventfully
> for the last six months on a Dell 5000e.
>
> The one problem is that X occasionally dies without coredump or cleanup with
> the error 'X in free(): error: recursive call.'. This usually (but not
> always) happens while using Mozilla with heavy window creation/deletion and
> heavy (dialup) network activity. This has happened under several recent
> versions of Mozilla, two different versions of fvwm2, with and without
> session managers, and with both X 4.0.3 and 4.1.0.
*ding*
So I'm not alone on this.
I experienced this a while back running XF86 HEAD from cvs.
The developers tracked it down to a signal handler calling malloc/free
through the 3-button emulation code.
You could be experiencing something completely different, but they
fixed my particular version of this problem in cvs a couple months ago
(I believe).
When experiencing the "crash", I would be heavily "clicking",
opening/moving/hiding/showing windows.
> It took me a while to identify the problem, because it happens infrequently,
> unpredicably, and leaves the video drivers in an unusable state (forcing a
> blind reboot). I tried linking /etc/malloc.conf to 'A' to get a coredump
> from X, but that doesn't work. I found a very short discussion of a related
> problem in the -CURRENT mail archives from the beginning of January, but
> there wasn't any apparent resolution of the problem.
This was discussed on the XFree86 lists, which you probably weren't
reading, being using a release.
> I'd like to get advice on which of the following courses of action to take:
>
> 1. Isolate and fix the problem. I would need some help here.
You /could/ fire up a copy of gdb on the server binary, but I believe
there are some messes with the modules XFree86 uses. (Don't take my
word for this, I know largely nothing about debugging X.)
> 2. Downgrade to -STABLE. The reason I was running -CURRENT originally was
> for ACPI support, but Dell has since released an APM-enabled BIOS for
> the 5000e, so -CURRENT is no longer a requirement.
This seems very much *not* a FreeBSD problem.
> 3. Upgrade to current -CURRENT. I don't know if this is such a good idea
> judging from mailing list traffic.
Same as above, NAFP.
> 4. Hang in with the status quo for another couple months until 5.0 is
> released, install that, and start back at #1 if that doesn't work.
Yet again, NAFP.
> Any advice, comments, or suggestions warmly appreciated.
Can you run a CVS version of XFree86? I believe this was repaired in one
of the more-recent (most-, possibly) 4.x releases.
> Thanks.
>
> -Michael Robinson
G'luck, cheers.
Daniel M. Kurry
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