BSD Ports

devel/ElectricFence 2.2.2_3 DragonFly

Debugging malloc() that uses the VM hardware to detect buffer overruns

System
DragonFly
Repository
DPorts
Maintainer
[email protected] (as in FreeBSD)
Categories
devel
Package size
24.0 KiB, 78.9 KiB installed

Description

Electric Fence is a different kind of malloc() debugger. It uses the virtual memory hardware of your system to detect when software overruns the boundaries of a malloc() buffer. It will also detect any accesses of memory that has been released by free(). Because it uses the VM hardware for detection, Electric Fence stops your program on the first instruction that causes a bounds violation. It's then trivial to use a debugger to display the offending statement.

It will probably port to any ANSI/POSIX system that provides mmap(), and mprotect(), as long as mprotect() has the capability to turn off all access to a memory page, and mmap() can use /dev/zero or the MAP_ANONYMOUS flag to create virtual memory pages.

Complete information on the use of Electric Fence is in the manual page efence(3).

In the other systems

SystemPortVersion
DragonFlydevel/ElectricFence2.2.2_3
FreeBSDdevel/ElectricFence2.2.2_3
OpenBSDdevel/ElectricFence2.0.5p0
HardenedBSDdevel/ElectricFence2.2.2_3
GhostBSDdevel/ElectricFence2.2.2_3

Install

Binary package:

pkg install electricfence

From DPorts:

cd /usr/dports/devel/ElectricFence && make install clean

Dependencies

No port depends on this one.

Configuration

No options to configure.

Service scripts
none

Message after installing

===>   NOTICE:

The electricfence port currently does not have a maintainer. As a result, it is
more likely to have unresolved issues, not be up-to-date, or even be removed in
the future. To volunteer to maintain this port, please create an issue at:

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla

More information about port maintainership is available at:

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/#ports-contributing