[64bit] emacs is unable to call subprocesses if display-time-mode is set

[Ken Brown]

On 3/30/2013 7:17 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Mar 30 06:54, Ken Brown wrote:
>> When you set display-time-mode in emacs, the mode line near the
>> bottom of the screen shows the current time.  The code that does
>> this involves setting itimers.
>
> Can you extrace a simple testcase from the itimer code?  That would help
> a lot to track down this case.  I'm a bit scared of emacs...

I was wrong about itimers.  It turns out that emacs uses two different 
kinds of timers.  One type is defined in C code and uses itimers, and 
the other type is defined in Lisp code.  It's the latter that's involved 
here.  So it won't be easy to make a test case in plain C.

I'm also finding that the order in which I do things affects whether or 
not the bug shows up.  For example, if I start a shell within emacs 
before setting display-time-mode, the bug disappears.  I'll keep looking 
at the emacs code, but maybe you'll be able to see something in the 
strace output.

Ken