Enhancing malloc

[Florian Weimer]

On 05/29/2013 02:53 PM, Will Newton wrote:

>> Other things to consider are fork friendliness and the impact of buffer
>> overruns and double-free bugs in application programs in terms of actual
>> security vulnerabilities.
>
> What do you mean by "fork friendliness" in this context?

The metadata updates performed by malloc/free can trigger copying of 
pages shared between the parent and child processes.  An obvious 
candidate for such behavior is a hash table keyed by the pointer 
returned by malloc.  Under this criterion, schemes which do not colocate 
metadata with object data tend to fare less well than schemes which do.

-- 
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team