I have a program failing with:
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
what(): St9bad_alloc
I imagine it's something to do with malloc/free, but I don't know which one.
What breakpoint can I in gdb set that will break on the error so that I can view a stack trace?
The program is a combination of C and C++, compiled with gcc 3.4.2.
It's quite possible that this happens due to some memory being overwritten, thus corrupting the memory allocation system's state (which is generally kept either before or after the memory blocks returned to the application).
If you have the possibility (i.e., you're on x86 Linux), run your program in Valgrind, it can often show you exactly where the corruption happens.
It is not really malloc/free which causes the exception, it is "new" which is definitely in C++ part of your application. It looks like you are providing a parameter which is too big for "new" to allocate.
'std::bad_alloc' is caused by the following code for example:
int * p = new int[50000000];
What does backtrace says when you load crash dump into gdb? If you cannot generate dump, you can ask GDB to stop when exception is thrown or caught. Unfortunately, some versions of GDB support only the following syntax:
catch throw
which allows you to break application when any exception is thrown. However, in help you see that it should be possible to run
catch throw std::bad_alloc
in newer versions.
And don't forget that:
(gdb) help catch
is a good source for other useful information.