Bug 185762 – [GTK] Initialize bmalloc only when needed

• Status: REOPENED
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Milan Crha]

Would it be possible to initialize bmalloc only when it is really needed, please?

It's currently enough to preload WebKitGTK+ library and there's that bmalloc thread which has also some side effects, like the Gigacage allocations and so on. The Gigacage causes problems in various scenarios, when it crashes instead of fail gracefully and let the process run. (Like bug #183329 and downstream bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1564970 ).

You can test it with such a simple program like this:

---------------------------------------

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main (void)
{
	system ("sleep 30");
	return 0;
}

---------------------------------------

Compile it with:

   $ gcc simple.c -o simple -g

Then run it as:

   $ ./simple

and see its backtrace:

   $ gdb --batch --ex "t a a bt" -pid=`pidof simple`

which shows only a single thread and nothing else. Run it as this:

   $ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so ./simple

and the backtrace will show also the bmalloc thread, even there's not called any single method from the webkit library.

[Michael Catanzaro]

bmalloc is always needed, sorry.

[Michael Catanzaro]

> int main (void)
>{
>	system ("sleep 30");
>	return 0;
>}


Um, I didn't read. As usual. Sorry. ;)

[Milan Crha]

Yeah, it was meant as "initialize on demand, not on library load".

Feel free to close this, though. This is just about "nice to have", but if it would mean any unnecessary complexity of the code, then it does not worth it, I believe.