[1220] in linux-security and linux-alert archive
Re: [linux-security] libc 5.4.7
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (steve farrell)
Sun Oct 13 12:57:04 1996
To: florian@jurix.jura.uni-sb.de (Florian La Roche)
Cc: dholland@eecs.harvard.edu (David Holland), jauderho@netcom.com (Jauder Ho),
potato@dsnet.com, linux-gcc@vger.rutgers.edu,
linux-security@tarsier.cv.nrao.edu
From: steve farrell <spfarrel@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 1996 14:53:38 -0500
In-Reply-To: florian@jurix.jura.uni-sb.de's message of Thu, 10 Oct 1996 10:51:27 +0200
florian@jurix.jura.uni-sb.de (Florian La Roche) writes:
>
> David Holland writes:
> > > 5.4.8 is totally buggy for me. I am unable to compile anything
> > > with it. I get a bunch of undefined stuff. I think putshort is one of
> > > them.. just try compiling a hello.c with 5.4.8 There is a need to fix this
> > > and others so that we have a decent working libc. 5.4.7 is pretty stable
> > > but is pretty stable stable enough. Besides the 5.4.x series of libcs
> > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > ?
> > > crashes netscape if it runs java and occasionally causes netscape to croak
> > > without reason.
> >
> > Does this happen to anyone else?
> >
> > Does anyone have any idea why? Do we need to make a 5.3.12A release?
>
> This is happening for many people. One problem is an incompatible libxpm
> and the other seems to be different malloc in 5.3.12 or higher.
i've compiled 5.4.7 with the old malloc and the new malloc, and it
*definitely* appears to cause instability with netscape/java runtime
to use the new doug lea malloc. evidentally the difference is that
the old malloc is forgiving of deletes called on non-malloc'd memory,
but the new is not. i am still planning to confirm that netscape is
in fact doing exactly this, and hence the instability.
probably the best suggestion i've heard is to use the LD_PRELOAD to
point netscape at it's own libc with the old malloc, and to write a
script to launch netscape as such. i've just recompiled my libc.5.4.7
using the old malloc and it works fine. i don't notice any slowdown
-- others do -- but i'm using a P6, so...
--steve farrell
> (5.2.18 is best for netscape.)
in my (obviously informal) tests, 5.4.7 with old malloc is fine for
netscape. however, short of compiling a special 5.4.7, using
LD_PRELOAD to get 5.2.18 w/netscape only is probably a good plan.
> xpm seems to be the worst thing. If you have menues or buttons with small
> icons, netscape easily crashes. (Those icons are normally only available,
> if people have installed Motif.)
interesting -- i haven't seen this
