[tex-live] TeXLive Pretest - XeTeX segfaults on LInux 64

[Ulrik Vieth]

Hi folks,

today I have been testing TL 2010 pretest on both Linux64 and Windows32.

Unfortunately I have been running into segfaults again for XeTeX
on Linux 64 when trying to use OpenType math fonts with XeLaTeX.

It already crashes while loading the unicode-math package, even
before typesetting a single equation, using a test file like this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{unicode-math}

\setromanfont{XITS}
\setmathfont{XITS Math}

\begin{document}
\end{document}

When it doesn't segfault, XeTeX doesn't work correctly either, e.g.
it ends up with all math-related fontdimens initialized to zero
instead of the values from the MATH table of the OpenType font.

All previous reports on the XeTeX mailing list seem to indicate
that problems with XeTeX exists on several 64 bit architectures
(not just Linux64), while it seems to work fine on 32 bit systems.
(I had no problems testing on Windows32 on 64 bit hardware.)

Given the soon approaching deadline for TeX Live releases, I wonder what 
would be a good workaround to supply a working XeTeX to users:

Would it be a feasible idea to supply Linux32 binaries for XeTeX
on Linux64 platforms? Would this work at all or would this require 
additional infrastructure (e.g. 32 bit versions of libraries)?

I'm just a little concerned that XeTeX seems to be broken on some 
platforms for some time now and nobody seems to be able to fix it,
so I'm afraid that we might end up shipping broken versions.

Is there an easy workaround by just staying with 32 bit for now?

Regards, Ulrik