Re: malloc: ../bash-5.2.21/dispose_cmd.c:249: assertion botched

[Dennis Clarke]

On 3/4/24 12:05, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 2/29/24 12:11 PM, Dennis Clarke via Bug reports for the GNU Bourne 
> Again SHell wrote:
> > Well this has me a bit baffled.
> >
> > I downloaded the bash source tarball for 5.2.21 and then applied the 
> > few patches to get me to :
> >
> > io$
> > io$ which bash
> > /opt/bw/bin/bash
> > io$ bash --version
> > GNU bash, version 5.2.26(1)-release (armv7l-unknown-linux-gnueabihf)
> > Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> > License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 
> > <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
> >
> > This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
> > There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
> > io$
> >
> > I then did a configure for a very stripped down shell :
> >
> > configure --prefix=/opt/bw --enable-minimal-config \
> >  > --enable-history --enable-strict-posix-default \
> >  > --enable-threads=posix --with-curses --with-gnu-ld
> >
> > This is a pretty darn minimal config there.
> >
> > When I try to use that shell ( for just about anything ) I get this
> > message very often :
> >
> > malloc: ../bash-5.2.21/dispose_cmd.c:249: assertion botched
> > free: called with already freed block argument
>
> I can't reproduce this on a generic RHEL system using this configuration,
> but that's probably not close enough to what you're using.
>
> You're running the release version, so you don't have any bash malloc
> debugging, but you could rebuild a version with valgrind:
>
> make clean
> make valgrind
>
> (this basically removes all the malloc wrappers bash uses to give you
> the file and line number information you saw).
>
> Then see what it tells you.
>
> It might be something as simple as using an old version of bison, for
> example.

Firstly, and this needs to be said, thank you for the reply. I was
wondering if the mail list had fallen silent but clearly we are alive
and well! Thank you.

The bison version is a bit older but not crusty and dusty :

io$ bison --version
bison (GNU Bison) 3.3.2
Written by Robert Corbett and Richard Stallman.

Copyright (C) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
io$

What I shall do is look at the dependency tree for bison 3.8.2 and build
everything from bottom to top. Then get into a valgrind build and see
what happens. Good advice. Thank you. Half of the problem is that the
hardware is weird! Not sure who else bothers with 32-bit armv7l but my
guess is that it is mostly in the embedded world.

I'll get to work on that and let you know.



--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken