A user reports that while starting my app, he had a memory error. Soft resetting with the reset pin, the reset process would start for half a second, then the screen would go blank for a second, and the reset would restart by itself, looping like this forever. He tried a no-notification reset (PageUp with reset pin), to no avail. In the end, he had to do a hard reset to get out of the loop. What can be causing such a behavior? My application does not even handle notifications.
A write to memory that destroys data structures used to describe the storage heap could cause this kind of situation. Not being able to do a no-notify reset means that the system can't actually rebuild the storage heap structures, and doesn't know where anything is on the device. In theory, this shouldn't happen with Palm OS, but it does, possibly due to malfunctioning of applications that turn off the memory protection semaphore, or of writes to low memory globals (through a NULL pointer) that aren't caught by the system.
-- Ben Combee, DTS technical lead, PalmSource, Inc. Read "Combee on Palm OS" at http://palmos.combee.net/
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