On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 11:01 +0200, Jim Meyering wrote: > If you are into development on glibc-based systems > and do not set MALLOC_PERTURB_ to a nonzero value, then you > are missing an easy opportunity to detect subtle bugs early. > > Sure, you can use valgrind, and it will detect whatever a > MALLOC_PERTURB_ setting would have caught, and more, but it's > far more expensive and takes some effort, however minimal. > > If you use zsh or bash, put this in one of your startup files: > > # http://udrepper.livejournal.com/11429.html > export MALLOC_PERTURB_=$(($RANDOM % 255 + 1)) > > and remember that when you find surprising bugs, that others > who are also running tests (but without MALLOC_PERTURB_) > will not see the same failures. > > This is useful enough that it is worth considering for inclusion > in /etc/profile. If I'm reading how bash starts up correctly, potentially, we could have a: /etc/profile.d/malloc-perturb.sh file, perhaps owned by a malloc-perturb.rpm (perhaps a subpackage of glibc? glibc-malloc-perturb) - installing the rpm would give you an opt-in for whole-system memory debugging. Might be useful for the automated QA systems, and for development hosts. Hope this is helpful Dave -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
