Electric Fence - still reliable?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:07:04 +0100, I wrote:

> Fedora 12 with LD_PRELOAD=libefence.so.0.0 EF_ALLOW_MALLOC_0=1, what is
> more likely that these are false positives or real bugs?

It's hard to find GNOME/GTK apps that don't crash. One that works fine
in efence is "gnome-about".

Many non-GUI tools also pass. procps's w doesn't, and that's not a false
positive:

$ w

  Electric Fence 2.2.2 Copyright (C) 1987-1999 Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com>
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

  ==> setlocale() usage bug, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/548711


$ eog

  Electric Fence 2.2.2 Copyright (C) 1987-1999 Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com>
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

  ==> in ORBit corba-any.c  once more


$ evince

  Electric Fence 2.2.2 Copyright (C) 1987-1999 Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com>

ElectricFence Aborting: free(91dcd80): address not from malloc().
Illegal instruction (core dumped)

  ==> in glib2 gslice.c  once more


$ emacs

  Electric Fence 2.2.2 Copyright (C) 1987-1999 Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com>

ElectricFence Aborting: realloc(84203b8, 2037): address not from malloc().
Fatal error (4)Illegal instruction (core dumped)