Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 16:22:10 +0200 (SAT) From: Graham Wheeler <gram@cdsec.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Bug in 2.2.2 Message-ID: <199710201422.QAA11500@cdsec.com>
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Hi all This is just a brief follow up to the discussion that took place last month about the possible bug in PHKmalloc. There are two points worth mentioning: * the problem has not reoccurred with the firewall gateway program since linking with the alternative libmalloc. * the problem has been noted with other programs, including the firewall's authentication daemon (which I have since linked with libmalloc). More significantly, the problem has also occurred with the Midnight Commander, and with `ps'. [For those who missed the earlier discussion, the problem was corruption of the heap, which resulted in a circularly linked list of memory blocks in the internal heap data structures. At some point, a call to malloc/free then never returns but keeps the process in a running state, chewing up CPU cycles, and the process needs to be killed]. For the ps and mc cases, I could not verify that the code pointer was indeed in the malloc library at the time, but the symptoms displayed were exactly the same as with the earlier gateway problem, which was always in the malloc library. So it seems there is indeed a bug, either in phkmalloc or in some other FreeBSD library code which uses phkmalloc. I apologise for not being able to provide more detail than this. -- Dr Graham Wheeler E-mail: gram@cdsec.com Citadel Data Security Phone: +27(21)23-6065/6/7 Internet/Intranet Network Specialists Mobile: +27(83)-253-9864 Firewalls/Virtual Private Networks Fax: +27(21)24-3656 Data Security Products WWW: http://www.cdsec.com/
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