sandbox: Crash on startup

Dear Simon

I just wanted to play around with the sandbox "arch" of u-boot maybe adding tun/tap support. Current head compiled successfully but crashed immediately after startup in board_init_f:

? ? ? ?gd = malloc(sizeof(gd_t));
? ? ? ?assert(gd);

? ? ? ?memset((void *)gd, 0, sizeof(gd_t));

The simple reason was that malloc refers to u-boots internal malloc which is not initialized at this point. I added the following snippet

arch/sandbox/cpu/start.c +0 -0

index 685793e..c98ca61 100644
@@ -21,8 +21,12 @@
 

?#include <common.h>

arch/sandbox/cpu/start.c +2 -0

+static uint8_t malloc_area[1024*1024*256];
+

?int main(int argc, char *argv[])
?{
+ ? ?mem_malloc_init(malloc_area, sizeof(malloc_area)); +
? ? ? ?/*

and got the console working. Can you tell me what I am doing wrong when building u-boot from current head? Wouldn't it be a better approach to use the internal malloc of u-boot and acquire some memory from the system using mmap?

Regards
Matthias

Mi Matthias,

Quoted 11 lines · Matthias Weisser

Dear Simon

I just wanted to play around with the sandbox "arch" of u-boot maybe adding tun/tap support. Current head compiled successfully but crashed immediately after startup in board_init_f:

       gd = malloc(sizeof(gd_t));
       assert(gd);

       memset((void *)gd, 0, sizeof(gd_t));

Quoted 2 lines

The simple reason was that malloc refers to u-boots internal malloc which is not initialized at this point. I added the following snippet

That is odd. This commit is supposed to switch over to the system malloc():

fe34107 sandbox: Disable built-in malloc

Can you please check that it is there?

I would first check that dlmalloc.o is not being linked, and that mem_malloc_init() is undefined.

The current setup works OK for me, but yes it would be nice use U-Boot's internal malloc(). The initial effort was to get a baseline implementation into U-Boot and there are a number of areas where it can be expanded. We want to test as much as possible of the code, and dlmalloc is no exception.

Quoted 9 lines · Matthias Weisser

I just wanted to play around with the sandbox "arch" of u-boot maybe adding tun/tap support. Current head compiled successfully but crashed immediately after startup in board_init_f:

       gd = malloc(sizeof(gd_t));
       assert(gd);

       memset((void *)gd, 0, sizeof(gd_t));

Quoted 2 lines

The simple reason was that malloc refers to u-boots internal malloc which is not initialized at this point. I added the following snippet

That is odd. This commit is supposed to switch over to the system malloc():

fe34107 sandbox: Disable built-in malloc

Can you please check that it is there?

Quoted 17 lines · On Tuesday 01 November 2011 10:01:53 Simon Glass wrote:

Quoted 11 lines · Matthias Weisser

I just wanted to play around with the sandbox "arch" of u-boot maybe adding tun/tap support. Current head compiled successfully but crashed immediately after startup in board_init_f:

? ? ? ?gd = malloc(sizeof(gd_t));
? ? ? ?assert(gd);

? ? ? ?memset((void *)gd, 0, sizeof(gd_t));

The simple reason was that malloc refers to u-boots internal malloc which is not initialized at this point. I added the following snippet

That is odd. This commit is supposed to switch over to the system malloc():

fe34107 sandbox: Disable built-in malloc

Quoted 1 line

Can you please check that it is there?

hmm, this was working for me, but now it's not. ?so something has changed ...

but probably best to cut over to the mmap/virtual mapping route proposed elsewhere so that we can test the internal u-boot malloc and not worry about people accidentally breaking sandbox like this in the future. -mike