[tex-live] TeX Live 2008: nasty pdf(la)tex bug on Solaris SPARC with ZFS

[Karl Berry]

    two odd things noticed on AIX:

    1) pdftex prints some garbage to terminal and to the log instead

Possibly a compiler bug?  Anyway, if it only happens on AIX, I fear
you're the only one who can debug it ...

    2) xetex does not work on aix, it produces an error when generating a
       format file, and actually even when starting in INITEX mode:

        $ xetex -ini 
        fatal: memory exhausted (xmalloc of 72367120 bytes).

Well, that at least should be debuggable, e.g., run it under the
debugger, trap the exit in xmalloc.c, and then run ps on the process to
see how much it's really using.

   i wonder if this failure is just because of insufficient memory, 

It should run in 768mb of memory!  Sheesh.

   or a bug. 
   are there some "aggressive" limits for xetex set in texmf.cnf?

I don't think xetex is any more aggressive than anything else.
Everything allocates a ton of stuff these days.

karl