Re: LeLisp Voodo

[Vincent.Prunet@sophia.inria.fr (Vincent Prunet)]

We also encountered some strange problems, that seem to be related with memory
allocation and the save/restore core mechanism.

In some circumstances, that we are able to reproduce but unable to explain,
the system hangs with a low level error (** sun4 : machine error : ...) when
we try to initialize the display or load a database file.

We found that these errors can be avoided by allocating a block of unused
memory.  Of course we alerted Ilog, the company that sells Lelisp, but they
did not provide an answer to this problem yet.


	How to allocate a block of memory.

If you use centaur1.2 the function _malloc should be already defined. 
Otherwise, you may want to define this function like this: 

(defextern |_malloc| (fix) external)

Before the initialization of the running centaur, call (malloc 10000).  This
can be done either by installing this code as a patch  (see the
centaur/patches directory), or by calling centaur -top, then executing this
piece of code just before the various initializations, later performed by
(initializemodule).  


I do not know whether Thomas encountered the same problem as us. However I
think that it is worth trying this trick.

Vincent