malloc changes

Emil Mikulic emikulic at dmr.ath.cx
Thu Feb 2 14:22:34 PST 2006


On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 01:43:43PM -0800, walt wrote:
> Matthew Dillon wrote:
> [...]
> >     The patch looks ok to my quick perusal.  I would like to get some
> >     testing by other users, in particular with GUI programs like mozilla.
> >     If that works out ok we can commit it.
> 
> Specifically what problems should we look for.  Panics, memory leaks,
> what else?

This is the userland malloc(), so it's highly unlikely this would cause
any kernel panics, and it shouldn't cause leaks in programs that don't
already have them.

IIRC, when OpenBSD did this, they found a lot of problems with programs
that wrote past the end of a malloc'd buffer because their mmap malloc
puts in ElectricFence-esque guard pages.

So I guess what you're looking for is segfaults resulting from writes
outside of the malloc'd blocks.

--Emil





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