bug#24892: {s, }brk removed from FreeBSD 11.x and later, arm64 architecture
Paul Eggert
eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Fri Nov 18 16:28:28 UTC 2016
Ashish SHUKLA wrote:
> One of the FreeBSD developer has
> pointed me to this ongoing discussion[1] on freebsd-hackers@ list.
>
> References:
> [1] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2016-November/050144.html
OK, thanks, I'll CC: freebsd-hackers. FreeBSD hackers: this is following up on
this serious Emacs bug report, which says that Emacs no longer works on FreeBSD
11.x arm64:
https://bugs.gnu.org/24892
The referenced FreeBSD discussion appears to be under the misapprehension that
sbrk is useful only to estimate how much memory is in use, and since this use
has long been wrong sbrk should be unceremoniously removed. Unfortunately, this
assumption is incorrect for Emacs, as (bleeding-edge) Emacs uses its own
allocator during its build process, and reverts to malloc only during user
operation. (The build-time Emacs makes a copy of itself in a new executable, and
relies on sbrk during the build.) Obviously this is dicey and we are planning to
change Emacs to make it more portable; however, this will require nontrivial
reengineering on our part.
In the meantime we respectfully request that sbrk functionality be kept in
FreeBSD 11.x arm64 for a while. It is fine to mark it as deprecated or obsolete,
or even rename it, but please do not remove the functionality entirely.
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