Comment 9 for bug 1266492

This is going to be difficult to fix and invasive. I will do my best to explain why.

At the point of the failure we want to be able to print a backtrace. The only way to get a reliable backtrace is to use the unwinder provided by gcc via libgcc_s.so.1 (this may vary by machine). In order to get access to the unwinder we must dlopen that shared library. During the dlopen process we need to calloc enough structures to hookup the new shared library into the structures used by the dynamic linker.

One resolution to this problem is to ensure that malloc has a fall-back allocation scheme that is robust against failure and then during the malloc_printerr we flip an internal bit and switch to the temporary reserve allocations. We could also create a new internal API for using the temporary allocations and then dlopen could use that in the event that we are crashing and need to dlopen one last library (the unwinder on demand). That would prevent other threads from consuming the reserve allocations after malloc_printerr is entered by another thread.

This is a considerable amount of work and we aren't going to get to this issue until a core developer or someone with serious interest commits to fixing this. Therefore I'm moving this to SUSPENDED until we find the resources to fix the issue.

This issue should remain open and new issues submited about this bug should be marked as duplicates of this issue.