Electric Fence – detect programming bugs

Last Updated on July 10, 2021

Electric Fence (eFence) is a debugger that uses virtual memory hardware to detect illegal memory accesses. It can detect two common programming bugs: software that overruns or underruns the boundaries of a malloc() memory allocation, and software that touches a memory allocation that has been released by free().

Unlike other malloc() debuggers, Electric Fence will detect read accesses as well as writes, and it will stop and pinpoint the exact instruction that causes an error. It is not as thorough as Purify, however.

In order to debug a program it needs to be linked with Electric Fence’s library or dynamic linking needs to be used.

eFence triggers a program crash when the memory error occurs, so a debugger can be used to inspect the code that caused the error.

By combining Electric Fence with gdb, you can track down exactly what line tried to access the protected memory.

Website: elinux.org
Support:
Developer: Burce Perens
License: GNU GPL

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