Date: Thu, 06 Aug 1998 18:42:30 -0700 From: David Greenman <dg@root.com> To: "Andrew Reilly" <reilly@zeta.org.au> Cc: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>, wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: memory leaks in libc Message-ID: <199808070142.SAA10235@implode.root.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 07 Aug 1998 11:02:43 %2B1000." <19980807110243.A9734@reilly.home>
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>On Fri, Aug 07, 1998 at 03:23:29AM +1000, Bruce Evans wrote: >> >So you both agree, then, that there is no point in wasting any more >> >time on this? >> >> Not quite. It should be fixed someday. > >I always thought it odd that there were no implimentations of >free() that were able to identify whether the pointer that they >were passed was something that malloc had handed out previously. >Surely malloc's data structures must have something to say about >it. > >If free() could know this, then things like setenv could just go >ahead and call free(), and if the previous object had not been >malloc'ed then nothing would happen. If the string were malloced by the program (as opposed to the library), then it won't be expecting setenv() to do a hidden free(). This could lead to random memory corruption if the process modifies the freed memory. In all of this dicussion, I can't stop thinking that the cure sounds far worse than the disease. -DG David Greenman Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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