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

[Jonathan Kew]

On 12 Jul 2010, at 09:21, ulrik.vieth at arcor.de wrote:

> 
> I did check with ldd, but I don't have the exact ouput at hand.
> AFAIK, the XeTeX-modified ICU library was statically linked.
> Only stuff like fontconfig or zlib was dynamically linked.
> 
> I am running Ubuntu 10.4 on AMD 64, but I haven't checked yet
> which libaries are provided as 64 bit versions.
> 
> I wouldn't assume that the problem is with dynamic linking per se.
> I rather suspect that there are some issues with parsing the 
> font information on 64 bit systems in general. It doesn't always
> produce segfaults, but it may simply produce incorrect results.
> 
> When I first reported it to the XeTeX list some weeks ago,
> my problem was confirmed to exists on Solaris 64 as well,
> so this seems to be a generic problem of 64 bit architectures.

I'm pretty sure this is true; it's probably a straightforward error related to data structures/sizes/etc in the code that interprets the font tables, but I haven't had the opportunity to set up a 64-bit system and try to debug it. If someone on a 64-bit system cares to do a debug build and provide a backtrace from such a crash, that would be a good start towards identifying the problem.

JK