» Workaround for Eclipse Helios JVM crashes
You might run into this too: when using Eclipse Helios (3.6.2 here), it sometimes crashes on an alleged double free in the JVM, detected by glibc.
That's actually a feature of glibc that serves to detect bugs and security issues, which kills a process that tries to free a previously allocated memory area that has already been freed.
In this case, however, it is most probably a false positive, but glibc still decides to kill the process.
The workaround is to run Eclipse with the environment variable
MALLOC_CHECK_ set to
0. There are several ways to achieve this:
- when you run eclipse from a shell, run it like this:
- if you prefer to just run
eclipseor by clicking on an icon, create the following file in your $HOME/bin, e.g. like this (just copy/paste into a shell):
eclipsescript depending on how and where you installed it. If it comes from RPM packages, than
/usr/bin/eclipseis fine. If, like me, you downloaded the tarball from eclipse.org and unpacked it somewhere under your home, you must change it accordingly -- e.g. to
In any case, you should NOT add
export MALLOC_CHECK_=0 to your
~/.bashrc as that would turn off that glibc check for ALL the applications and processes you would run. And that's a bad idea.