[memory-management] What does 'corrupted double-linked list' mean

I ran into this error in some code where someone was calling exit() in one thread about the same time as main() returned, so all the global/static constructors were being kicked off in two separate threads simultaneously.

This error also manifests as double free or corruption, or a segfault/sig11 inside exit() or inside malloc_consolidate, and likely others. The call stack for the malloc_consolidate crash may resemble:

#0  0xabcdabcd in malloc_consolidate () from /lib/libc.so.6
#1  0xabcdabcd in _int_free () from /lib/libc.so.6
#2  0xabcdabcd in operator delete (...)
#3  0xabcdabcd in operator delete[] (...)
(...)

I couldn't get it to exhibit this problem while running under valgrind.