Heads up: *possible* bug in cygwin

[Charles Wilson]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 11:18:55PM -0500, Charles Wilson wrote:
> 
>>>If somebody with a debuggable cygwin kernel could look into this, I'd 
>>>appreciate it.  I'll try to follow up on my own, but it takes FOREVER to 
>>>do a 'cvs update' on the cygwin source tree over a 28.8k modem...
>>
>>Sigh.  Finally built a debuggable cygwin from current CVS.  Here's the 
>>stacktrace from the SIGSEGV.
> 
> 
> Problems "in the bowels" of malloc are invariably caused by memory
> corruption, like double freeing of a pointer, overrunning of a buffer,
> ignoring of OOM conditions, etc.  Given that the malloc in cygwin (to
> say nothing of Doug Lea's malloc) goes through a fairly heavy workout
> every day, I'd suspect the application before I'd suspect cygwin.

I would too -- but I can't see where any of the arguments to the 
functions, or any of the operations within the glib subroutines along 
the way, do any of that.  It all =seems= okay, but I'll probably have to 
pull out pencil and paper and keep track of all the pointers by hand. 
Or can I just turn on -DDEBUG when compiling malloc.cc...

Plus, glib-2.0.7 is at least as well tested as cygwin (and might be 
close to as well tested as dlmalloc). It's hard to imagine that a buffer 
overrun or double-free was overlooked in glib's own testsuite, given 
that folks on non-cygwin platforms can use stuff like purify and 
electricfence when they test.

And finally, that doesn't explain why the *same code*, *unchanged*, 
worked on May 1, 2002, but doesn't now.  I wish I had the cygwin dll and 
importlib from then, so I could eliminate that variable...

Hmmm...glib does a lot of testing against NULL to determine whether a 
pointer has been initialized -- but declares these pointers as
   gpointer foo;
not
   gpointer foo = NULL;
Did gcc (pre 3.2) automatically initialize data to 0, while gcc-3.2 does 
not?  Hmmm...waitaminute, I do have gcc2 installed...

--Chuck


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