[comp.soft-sys.andrew] More on Andrew PL7 on Sun OS 4.1

jis@mtgzx.att.com (J Mukerji) (10/05/90)

I rebuilt Andrew PL7 on a Sparcstation 1+ SunOS 4.1 using -Bstatic flag
and still continued to get the same coredumps from ez etc. So I started
experimenting with removing preferences from my preferences file.

Experimentation shows that 90% of the coredumps (in effect all the
coredumps that were tracable to have originated in frame.c) that I was
getting are correlated with the presence of the line;

     DialogPriority 30

in my  .preferences file. Removing that preference or setting
DialogPriority to 99, causes the coredumps to go away. This suggests
that the code that deals with the DialogPriority stuff is probably
managing to write something at a memory location where it ought not to.

The most serious remaining coredump is from messages. Trace from gdb
shows that it happens in the function MS_NameChangedMapFile() in file
namechg.c, line 95, which reads:

     SubsInPathOrder[i]->HasChanged = 0;

This probably suggests that someone somewhere has let loose a write
along a wild pointer. Sendmessage works fine now. Vui still coredumps
upon attempting to read mail. That dump happens in function
BuildPrivateSubscriptionMap() in file bldpvmap.c line 55, which reads:

    for (subsindex = 0; subsindex<NumSubsInUse &&
    SubsInPathOrder[subsindex]->pathelt != pathindex; ++subsindex) {
        ;
        }

Anyone see any relationship between those two?

Unfortunately, the code that deals with setting up the display for low
dialog priority settings looks so complex that I do not dare go poking
in it to see what it is doing. 

I will try to take a closer look at what messages is upto.
                            Jishnu Mukerji,  
                           jis@mtgzx.att.com, 
                           +1 201 957 5986,  
                        AT&T Bell Laboratories, 
                      MT 3K-423, 200 Laurel Ave., 
                           Middletown NJ 07748