| electric-fence |
| ============== |
| This is Electric Fence 2.2 — 25-Sep-2014 |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| This version will run on: |
| |
| BSD and OS/X |
| |
| Linux kernel version 1.1.83 and above. Earlier kernels have problems |
| with the memory protection implementation. |
| |
| All System V Revision 4 platforms (and possibly earlier revisions) |
| including: |
| Every 386 System V I've heard of. |
| Solaris 2.x |
| SGI IRIX 5.0 (but not 4.x) |
| |
| IBM AIX on the RS/6000. |
| |
| SunOS 4.X (using an ANSI C compiler and probably static linking). |
| |
| HP/UX 9.01, and possibly earlier versions. |
| |
| OSF 1.3 (and possibly earlier versions) on a DECalpha. |
| |
| On some of these platforms, you'll have to uncomment lines in the Makefile |
| that apply to your particular system, though it would be better if someone |
| added a better build-system so that this was not necessary. |
| |
| If you test Electric Fence on a platform not mentioned here, please send me a |
| report. |
| |
| 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 |
| libefence.3 . You can read it with "man ./libefence.3". |
