-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 08/07/2010 06:59 AM, Robert Nichols wrote: > Pages newly allocated by the kernel will be zeroed. They begin life as > a copy-on-write mmap() of /dev/zero. Mostly true although /dev/zero hasn't played a role in this for many years now. Anonymous memory returned by mmap must be cleared. Memory provided by sbrk can be cleared and it is on Linux. This is all rather problematic nowadays since it means many unnecessary memory operations, in general. There have been lots of talks about relaxing the rules for sbrk and adding an mmap flag to avoid the clearing. This can easily be accommodated in the userlevel implementation and lead to big improvements. > Once you have used and freed > memory from those pages, however, that memory will not be re-zeroed. It's only guaranteed to be cleared upon reused, not directly after they are freed. > If a subsequent malloc() happens to grab that same memory you will see > the old contents. It will, however, be data written there by the > current process. Perhaps a bit strong: no memory freed with free() must be assumed to be cleared. Only when the memory is returned to the kernel will it before the next use be cleared. Everything else would be a big performance issue. You can see it yourself by using MALLOC_PERTURB_. It's really a debugging tool to find call site which depend on malloc clearing memory and use memory after fgreeing. But it obviously it's also useful for scrubbing memory. - -- ➧ Ulrich Drepper ➧ Red Hat, Inc. ➧ 444 Castro St ➧ Mountain View, CA ❖ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkxdjSAACgkQ2ijCOnn/RHTb4QCgwuuap+Y3vMpUfqGlUAT1SMqz rj4AnjrKOSLzpLAOxCtCxI6EMnAJTL1Z =Zf5P -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
