HEADS DOWN

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-05-13 02:30, Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> wrote:
>Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>> In message <20070512153532.GQ21795 at elvis.mu.org>, Alfred Perlstein writes:
>>> I like how phk malloc has it as an option.
>> 
>> But notice that it is not an option for programs that runs as root
>> or setuid/setgid etc.
>> 
>> Given the hostility of networks, I would support a more hardcore
>> attitude to memory mismanagement these days.
> 
> Just a data point: many people were turned away from FreeBSD because a
> few PHP releases did a double-free or malloc-inside-signal-handler
> calls. Yes, GNU's malloc should have been stricter, but it's not funny
> when your apache crashes with SIGABORT.

This seems to imply that not crashing would somehow be better.  But I
doubt anybody would be happy if they realized that their PHP randomly
corrupted user data because the system malloc() implementation was not
strict enough.

While I agree that an Apache server crashing is a bar thing, I don't buy
into the mindset that would accept random heap corruption because "not
crashing would be good".

- Giorgos