realloc(): invalid next size

realloc(): invalid next size

[Winston Weinert]

Occasionally when tab completing, zsh crashes with this message
"realloc(): invalid next size". I am using oh-my-zsh, for what it's
worth, though I assume zsh should never dump core during normal use. My
zsh version is: zsh 5.4.2 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu).

I did a little digging and found I'm not the only person who has
encountered this issue, but it appears my list is exhaustive of Google's
results:

- https://github.com/rvm/rvm/issues/4214 (one user reports the crash
with only autoload -uZ compinit; compinit) with rvm enabled.
- https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=234501 (nothing very useful
here, just a report)

Regards,
Winston Weinert

Re: realloc(): invalid next size

[Winston Weinert]

> Occasionally when tab completing, zsh crashes with this message
> "realloc(): invalid next size". I am using oh-my-zsh, for what it's
> worth, though I assume zsh should never dump core during normal use. My
> zsh version is: zsh 5.4.2 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu).
> 
> I did a little digging and found I'm not the only person who has
> encountered this issue, but it appears my list is exhaustive of Google's
> results:
> 
> - https://github.com/rvm/rvm/issues/4214 (one user reports the crash
> with only autoload -uZ compinit; compinit) with rvm enabled.
> - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=234501 (nothing very useful
> here, just a report)

I found some more issues discussing this:
- https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/issues/4346 (includes links
to backtraces)
- https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto/issues/6
- https://sourceforge.net/p/zsh/bugs/87/

Re: realloc(): invalid next size

[Bart Schaefer]

So, the stack trace indicates this is happening in expandjobtab(),
which tends to imply that something is fork-bombing or otherwise
flooding the job table.

This may mean that MAX_MAXJOBS (default 1000) is too large for the
memory space required by the job table?  If you recompile with a
smaller value for MAX_MAXJOBS to you get an error message instead
of a crash?