1997-11-12 23:46:32 +00:00
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Electric Fence is a different kind of malloc() debugger. It uses the virtual
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memory hardware of your system to detect when software overruns the boundaries
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of a malloc() buffer. It will also detect any accesses of memory that has
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been released by free(). Because it uses the VM hardware for detection,
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Electric Fence stops your program on the first instruction that causes
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a bounds violation. It's then trivial to use a debugger to display the
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offending statement.
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It will probably port to any ANSI/POSIX system that provides mmap(), and
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mprotect(), as long as mprotect() has the capability to turn off all access
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to a memory page, and mmap() can use /dev/zero or the MAP_ANONYMOUS flag
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to create virtual memory pages.
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Complete information on the use of Electric Fence is in the manual page
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2002-03-16 17:25:07 +00:00
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efence(3).
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