malloc causes a crash

[ezmora]

I face intermittent crashes in my native code.
Debugging the stack trace, I saw that it's in fact the call to
'malloc' that caused the crash.

1. Is there a way to keep track of total memory usage? (i.e.,
situations where we're running on low memory)
2. Is it possible that there’s a bug in android’s implementation of
malloc?
3. When can malloc crash (i.e, if the size passed to it is too big, or
negative)?

Is mcheck supported by the NDK?
Any other ideas how to proceed?

Eyal

[Pablo Márquez]

I would suggest implementing your own version of the allocators, then in your implementation you can track every allocation as you please.

I believe it's unlikely that there is a bug in Bionic's malloc, the problem is probably that your code is corrupting the memory and this makes malloc crash

Cheers,

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[David Turner]

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 3:16 PM, ezmora <eyal...@gmail.com> wrote:

I face intermittent crashes in my native code.
Debugging the stack trace, I saw that it's in fact the call to
'malloc' that caused the crash.

1. Is there a way to keep track of total memory usage? (i.e.,
situations where we're running on low memory)

Not really, "low on memory" is a very dynamic condition on Android because the system will make room for your application by shutting down other processes.

 

2. Is it possible that there’s a bug in android’s implementation of
malloc?

Very very unlikely (see below).

 

3. When can malloc crash (i.e, if the size passed to it is too big, or
negative)?

malloc will typically crash when it detects that the heap has been corrupted (due to a buggy program).

Actually, if the fault address is "0xdeadbaad", that's a special name to indicate that this exactly happened.

The root cause of the problem could be anywhere though, in your own code.

 

Is mcheck supported by the NDK?
Any other ideas how to proceed?

Eyal