FreeBSD and Debugging?

[Ted Unangst]

On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Brandon Erhart wrote:

> Are there any debuggers out there for BSD that will detect the heap/stack
> corruption!?

[standard disclaimer and note about self-promotion goes here :)]

valgrind and electric fence are very good suggestions.  my own personal
pet project was adding guard pages to the system malloc.  then linking
malloc.conf -> AFGJ or setenv MALLOC_OPTIONS and you can find bugs in all
the software you run.  it's less complete than a dedicated heap checker,
but lightweight enough (well, 20% penalty may not be light for some) that
i run with it full time.  we've had a fairly significant amount of success
with it finding bugs in software that just happened to work.

http://www.zeitbombe.org/patches/malloc_guard.diff should apply pretty
cleanly to freebsd's malloc.c




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