Download List

Project Description

Electric Fence (efence) stops your program on the exact instruction that overruns (or underruns) a malloc() memory buffer. GDB will then display the source-code line that causes the bug. It works by using the virtual-memory hardware to create a red-zone at the border of each buffer - touch that, and your program stops. Catch all of those formerly impossible-to-catch overrun bugs that have been bothering you for years.

System Requirements

System requirement is not defined
Information regarding Project Releases and Project Resources. Note that the information here is a quote from Freecode.com page, and the downloads themselves may not be hosted on OSDN.

2005-08-30 16:43
2.4.16

The main focus of this release is better
portability. A standardized strerror() is now
used. An error which occurred when
EF_NO_LEAKDETECTION was defined was fixed.
Allocations from standard libraries are marked
before ef_init() is called to allow special
treatment in leak-checking. The default in eftest
was changed to use two signals at once: SIGSEGV
and SIGBUS. Alignments bigger than page size are
now allowed for memalign(). The EF_EXPLICIT_INIT
preprocessor flag was added to work around buggy
environments. Environment leaks are no longer
reported.
Tags: Minor bugfixes

2005-07-25 08:11
2.4.15

Bugs in page management under Windows where virtual address space was never released was fixed, though this fix avoids memory pooling (under Windows). An ExitOnFail parameter was added to Page_Create(). A warning is now displayed when an allocation failed and ExitOnFail is off. _eff_allocate() was extended for this.
Tags: Major bugfixes

2005-07-16 05:54
2.4.14

Bugfixes were made in memory management. New macros were provided for new and delete. Functions for doing extra checks were added for strdup(), memcpy(), strcpy(), strncpy(), strcat(), and strncat(). A new EF_SHOW_ALLOC environment switch was included.
Tags: Minor feature enhancements

2005-02-13 07:20
2.4.13

This release reworks and revises all internal functions. It
adds an EF_OLD_NEW_MACRO preprocessor flag to keep
compatibility to old NEW_ELEM() / NEW_ARRAY() macros.
Freeing already freed memory is now detected. It stores
__FILE__ and __LINE__ of free() to be able to print the
position of first free. This version fixes a bug that occurred
when calling eftest with a higher number e.g. 10000. There
were bugfixes to memalign() which was not exported.
Macros and functions are now also defined for valloc().

2005-02-03 05:58
2.4.12

A EF_NO_GLOBAL_MALLOC_FREE preprocessor flag was added to work around buggy environments. This prevents malloc(), free(), realloc(), and calloc() from being put into the global namespace of the efence library, thus only files which include efence.h will call the efence malloc() replacement functions. This flag is also helpful where the linking order cannot be controlled, for example when memory is allocated from a library not using efence, but free() is called from using efence. This is a problem when using .dll libraries linked against msvcrt.dll and its malloc/free under MS Windows.
Tags: Minor feature enhancements

Project Resources