Creative ideas on how to debug heap corruption

[Moritz Angermann]

Hi there!

as some of you may know, I've been working on an aarch64 native code
generator.  Now I've hit a situation where my stage2 compiler somehow
corrupts my heap.  Initially I thought this would likely be missing memory
barriers, however they are emitted.  This doesn't mean it can't be, but at
least it's not as simple as "they are just missing".

The crashes I see are non deterministic, in fact I sometimes even manage
to compile a Hello World module, without crashes.  Other times it crashes
with unknown closure errors or it just crashes.  But it always crashes
during GC.  Changing the nursery size make it crasha bit more frequent,
but nothing obvious sticks out yet.

If anyone has some create ideas, I'd love to hear them.  I've been wondering
if just logging allocations (offset, range, type) would help figuring out
what we
expected to be there; and then maybe try to break on the allocation, (and
subsequent writes).

I'm sure some have been down this road before.

Cheers,
 Moritz
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