Even the smallest program compiled with 8g segfaults when run under limited memory,
memory that should still be enough to allocate large amounts of memory by the program.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

(peter) ~/go cat hello.go 
package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
        fmt.Println("Hello, 世界")
}
(peter) ~/go 8g hello.go
(peter) ~/go 8l -o hello hello.8
(peter) ~/go ./hello 
Hello, 世界
(peter) ~/go ulimit -v 500000
(peter) ~/go ./hello 
throw: runtime: SysReserve returned unaligned address

Segmentation fault
(peter) ~/go 

What is the expected output?

Hello, 世界

What do you see instead?

throw: runtime: SysReserve returned unaligned address

Which compiler are you using (5g, 6g, 8g, gccgo)?

8g

Which operating system are you using?

i686 GNU/Linux

Which revision are you using?  (hg identify)

9d7967223815 (release-branch.r57) release/release.r57.2

Please provide any additional information below.

Running the program 'hello' compiled with Go release 56 gives a different error:

throw: runtime: cannot reserve arena virtual address space
Segmentation fault


Doing the same thing on Linux 64, with 'hello' compiled with 6g does not cause these
problems, not even with only a tenth of the value for ulimit. 

On Linux 32 (8g):
ulimit -v 800000  # program still runs
ulimit -v 700000  # segmentation fault

On Linux 64 (6g):
ulimit -v 40000   # program still runs.
ulimit -v 30000   # no segfault, but output: Killed
ulimit -v 10000   # other programs still run, like a small text editor
ulimit -v 9000    # other programs start failing with memory problems