On Thu, 29 Aug 2013 18:43:13 -0500, Tim Peters <tim.peters@gmail.com> wrote:
In
http://bugs.python.org/issue18843
a user reported a debug PyMalloc "bad leading pad byte" memory corruption death while running their code. After some thrashing, they decided to rebuild Python, and got the same kind of error while rebuilding Python. See
http://bugs.python.org/msg196481
in that bug report:
""" # emerge dev-lang/python:2.7
* IMPORTANT: 11 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'. * Use eselect news to read news items.
Calculating dependencies... done! Debug memory block at address p=0xa7f5900: API 'o' 80 bytes originally requested The 7 pad bytes at p-7 are not all FORBIDDENBYTE (0xfb): at p-7: 0xfb at p-6: 0xfb at p-5: 0xfa *** OUCH at p-4: 0xfb at p-3: 0xfb at p-2: 0xfb at p-1: 0xfb Because memory is corrupted at the start, the count of bytes requested may be bogus, and checking the trailing pad bytes may segfault. The 8 pad bytes at tail=0xa7f5950 are FORBIDDENBYTE, as expected. The block was made by call #21242094 to debug malloc/realloc. Data at p: 73 00 00 00 79 00 00 00 ... 67 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Fatal Python error: bad leading pad byte Aborted (core dumped)
Emerge uses Python, and 2.7 is the default system python on Gentoo, so unless he changed his default, that error almost certainly came from the existing Python he was having trouble with. Just for fun I re-emerged 2.7.3-r3 on my system, and that worked fine. --David