I can reproduce this on my system and didn't understand it first. With the old libraries it works fine - but just changing the shared libs [1] and I can't bootstrap temacs any more. I think I've found a big bad bug in the internal handling of __malloc_hook in glibc's malloc implementation. The following _hack_ should fix the bootstrapping: --- src/emacs.c.~2~ Thu Jun 17 08:31:05 1999 +++ src/emacs.c Thu Oct 28 16:03:22 1999 ＠＠ -536,6 +536,7 ＠＠ hook for a gmalloc of a potentially incompatible version. */ /* If we're using libmcheck, the hooks have already been initialized, */ /* don't touch them. -slb */ + malloc (4); __malloc_hook = NULL; __realloc_hook = NULL; __free_hook = NULL; I'm one of the glibc developers and have just send an email to the developers list to get this fixed asap in glibc. I'll keep you updated, Andreas Footnotes: [1] Please note that I use a self compiled glibc - but 2.1.2-6 is similiar to the version I'm running. -- Andreas Jaeger SuSE Labs aj(a)suse.de private aj(a)arthur.rhein-neckar.de