Buffer overuns with the Electric fence debugging library

Maurice Gittens <mgittens@gits.nl>

From: "Maurice Gittens" <mgittens@gits.nl>
To: "PostgreSQL-development" <hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 1998-03-18T11:33:49Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Hi everybody,

The electricfence library is a tool which helps us to detect
buffer overruns in C programs.

Linking Postgresql with this library gives at least 3 errors I have found
until now.

The errors manifest themselves in sql statements like:
1. create table test(f1 int);
This one allways fails.
2. select * from pg_shadow
Only some tables give errors so the problem seems to be related
to the type/alignment of fields in the tables.

The errors are all found in the DataFill function called from
heap_from_tuple.

I'm using a snapshot version of postgresql downloaded around
the release date 6.3.

This all is on Linux (Redhat 4.0) with Electric Fence version 2.0.5.

Do you guys feel comfortable with a database which has reproducible
buffer overuns?

I think it would be great is somebody who has more experience with
postgresql than I were to look at this.

I am now going to do some work which I actually get paid to do!

With regards from Maurice.