Score:0

w3m fails to launch with Wrong __data_start/_end pair

us flag

I am on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS x86_64. The program w3m fails to launch as follows:

$ w3m -h

Wrong __data_start/_end pair
Aborted (core dumped)

I have tried

  • installing and reinstalling;
  • setting a stack-size bound with ulimit, as suggested here.

No luck.

The issue also came up in another thread, but that is specific to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which I am not on.

Edit

Getting closer: this is a kernel issue.

The machine is running a custom-compiled kernel, currently at v5.17-rc3. If I go back to version 5.16 of the kernel I do not see the issue.

I'm not sure how things have changed for the 5.17 release, but it seems some modification to the kernel config is needed.

Edit 2

Found something promising on the kernel mailing list.

I have yet to test that patch, but it fits with what I'm seeing: the problem appearing after v5.17-rc1.

Score:0
us flag

That second edit has all I need: it was a kernel issue, due to the fact that I'm not running the standard Ubuntu version.

Compiling the latest version of the kernel (still v5.17-rc3 as I write this) with the patch provided here resolves the matter.

So I expect that by the time Linux 5.17 makes its way into the Ubuntu repos this will have been fixed upstream. In short, I'm all set.

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