Wow, that's a new one...

[worker201]

I was running a number-crunching program which produces a mathematical surface of the topography of an area. It's called surface, and it is part of the GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) suite. This takes about an hour if you have a pretty big file. Then it ran through some other programs (grdimage, grdcontour, pscoast, psxy) to produce a PostScript map.

Anyway, during this process today, I got the following error:

Code: Select all

*** glibc detected *** malloc(): memory corruption: 0x0849e0b8 ***


which caused it to abort the grdcontour command.

Very strange, what does this mean? As far as I know, glibc and malloc were not running. These are C programs, but they are fully built already.

Any explanations?

[Tux]

malloc() is a C function, it allocates chunks of RAM.
It seems part of your memory was corrupt, I suggest an overnight run of memtest86 to check for any physical faults.

Unless of course this is your mac?

[worker201]

While GMT can run well on a Mac, this was the office computer, the Dellbox with FC3.

Might try to run that, thanks!

[Void Main]

If the memory test passes I think it is possible that there could be a bug in the application that could cause that error as well. At least this post would indicate as much:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora- ... 03516.html

Tux's advice is good and would be the first thing I would check though.