Colin Putney wrote:

> David,
>
> The bug Tim is talking about is indeed a VM bug. What happens is that 
> the VM (sometimes?) treats pointers to objects as signed integers. 
> This works as long as the address of the object is less than 2GB - ie, 
> the highest bit of the pointer isn't set. Beyond that limit, the VM 
> attempts to do "pointer arithmetic" involving negative numbers, which 
> produces incorrect results.
>
> This is a fairly deep-seated bug in the core VM, nothing to do with 
> the platform-specific stuff or compilation options. The only work 
> around is to arrange for your OS to allocate memory below the 2GB 
> threshold. It's kind of tricky and I can't give you any advice for 
> doing it beyond searching the list archives - others have run into this.


Thanks for clarifying.  I thought Tim was trying to say that the image 
size was >2Gb which seemed strange for any image of mine, let along a 
stock "full" image :-)  I understand the problem now...I suspect there 
are kernel options to avoid problems with this.  I'll look into it and 
post what I find.  Thanks!

David