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Slightly modified version of a patch from Ben Collins <bcollins@ubuntu.com> who did the final debugging that showed the segfault was being caused the memory protection mechanism. Due to the requirement of "jump islands" to handle 24 bit relative jump offsets, GHCi on PowerPC did not use mmap to load object files like the other architectures. Instead, it allocated memory using malloc and fread to load the object code. However there is a quirk in the GNU libc malloc implementation. For memory regions over certain size (dynamic and configurable), malloc will use mmap to obtain the required memory instead of sbrk and malloc's call to mmap sets the memory readable and writable, but not executable. That means when GHCi loads code into a memory region that was mmapped instead of malloc-ed and tries to execute it we get a segfault. This solution drops the malloc/fread object loading in favour of using mmap and then puts the jump island for each object code module at the end of the mmaped region for that object. This patch may also be a solution on other ELF based powerpc systems but does not work on darwin-powerpc.
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