Christopher Faylor writes: > On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 09:12:45AM -0700, David Rothenberger wrote: > >David Rothenberger wrote: > >> > >> David Rothenberger writes: > >> > "Biederman, Steve" wrote: > >> > > > >> > > I want to allow the users I support to be able to run Cygwin tar on their > >> Windows machines. > >> > > These machines have not had any Cygwin installed; they're just bare Windows > >> machines. > >> > > > >> > > I provided them tar.exe and cygwin1.dll and assumed that with these, they > >> could run > >> > > Cygwin tar sucessfully. It appears that that isn't the case: machines > >> without Cygwin > >> > > installed see different behavior than machines which have it installed. > >> (Running tar > >> > > on machines without Cygwin installed creates incorrect tar archives.) > >> > > >> [snip] > >> > Through experimentation, I discovered that the problem went away if I > >> > created an /etc mount. > >> > >> I did a little debugging on this. It turns out that when tar > >> "hangs", the process is in an infinite loop in malloc_consolidate(). > > > >Some googling uncovered that loops in malloc_consolidate() are usually a > >sign of heap corruption. More googling suggested that compiling the > >cygwin dll with --enable-malloc-debugging would be helpful for finding > >heap corruption. But, I'm have quite a bit of trouble getting the dll > >to compile with that configure switch. > > That's because it is currently broken. There was a hack posted to get it > working. I think it was to the cygwin mailing list.
I came up with a different hack to get it working enough for my purposes. After reading the thread Chris mentioned, I don't think I'll submit those changes as a patch. Enabling malloc debugging did allow me to find the source of the heap corruption that was breaking tar. I'll submit the patch to fix it shortly. Dave -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
