Re: Current tools for finding memory overwrites



In message <1170061975.577620.64890@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, asperamanca@xxxxxxxxx writes
Thanks for the info. I already downloaded a trial version and gave it
a try, but either there's nothing to be found (where I expect it), or
it might have trouble with a VB6-built application, or (most likely) I
don't yet understand the configuration well enough.

Fair enough, the whole problem with memory corruptions is that you can only detect a corruption in the area around a memory allocation, not the allocation itself (because it may be a valid write - the only people that can detect a corruption of data in an object are the people that wrote the object, by writing a function for integrity testing and calling it at regular intervals).

That said MV has many options for detecting errors. Some of them obvious, others not so. The tutorial has quite a few pointers. Plus if you know where the data is getting knobbled, the analysis tab coupled with the Allocation History settings (disable purging) can be useful for finding references to your object that also reference parts of previously deleted objects (there is your problem, some of your code is pointing at dead objects and writing over the current objects, now you know which ones, so you can go hunting). No competing tool has functionality to allow such queries.

Stephen
--
Stephen Kellett
Object Media Limited http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/software.html
Computer Consultancy, Software Development
Windows C++, Java, Assembler, Performance Analysis, Troubleshooting
.



Relevant Pages

  • Re: [PATCH 00/28] Swap over NFS -v16
    ... I'm so glad you are working with me on this and writing this in human ... there is the swap cache. ... allocation and freeing, and that wouldn't work well with slub. ... write-intent bitmaps for md/raid arrays. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: SCSI breakage on non-cache coherent architectures
    ... I've been hitting irregulary is a crash on SCSI command ... completion that seems to be related to corruption of the "request" ... What other drivers do is DMA to their own allocation and then memcpy to ... the sense buffer. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard
    ... > The right way to handle this, of course, is to encapsulate the ... > allocation of the table and to use a symbolic range, ... Of course there is that little problem of writing, e.g., that memory ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Low-bandwith ADSL, or something? (mostly off-topic)
    ... the following was guaranteed to cause corruption: ... >- writing to small files ... IIRC NTFS stores small files directly in the MFT, ... Prev by Date: ...
    (uk.comp.os.linux)
  • MY SCAN DISK WONT WORK
    ... >My scan disk won't work. ... ten tries and another drive was writing to the File ... Allocation Table. ... Good Luck ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsupdate)