http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2010-06/msg00005.html

Hi,

unfortunately I see this problem reproducible only with the
archer-jankratochvil-vla branch (VLA = Variable Length Arrays - char[var]).
OTOH this branch I hopefully submit in some form for FSF GDB later.

In this case (a general problem but tested for example on Fedora 13 i686):

int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
  char a[argc];
  return a[0];
}

(gdb) start
(gdb) print a
../../gdb/utils.c:1251: internal-error: virtual memory exhausted: can't allocate 4294951689 bytes.

It is apparently because boundary for the variable `a' is not initialized
there.  Users notice it due to Eclipse-CDT trying to automatically display all
the local variables on each step.

Apparentl no regressions on {x86_64,x86_64-m32,i686}-fedora13-linux-gnu.
But is anone aware of the reasons to use internal_error there?
I find simple error as a perfectly reasonable there.
(history only tracks it since the initial import)

IIRC this idea has been discussed with Tom Tromey, not sure of its origin.

I understand it may be offtopic for FSF GDB but from some GDB crashes I am not
sure if it can happen only due to the VLA variables.

Thanks,
Jan

gdb/
2010-06-01  Jan Kratochvil  <jan.kratochvil@redhat.com>
	    Tom Tromey  <tromey@redhat.com>

	* utils.c (nomem): Change internal_error to error.

diff --git a/gdb/utils.c b/gdb/utils.c
--- a/gdb/utils.c
+++ b/gdb/utils.c
@@ -721,13 +721,11 @@ malloc_failure (long size)
 {
   if (size > 0)
     {
-      internal_error (__FILE__, __LINE__,
-		      _("virtual memory exhausted: can't allocate %ld bytes."),
-		      size);
+      error (_("virtual memory exhausted: can't allocate %ld bytes."), size);
     }
   else
     {
-      internal_error (__FILE__, __LINE__, _("virtual memory exhausted."));
+      error (_("virtual memory exhausted."));
     }
 }