[Icecast-dev] You don't check for malloc failure

[Maarten Bezemer]

Hi,

> On Fri, 2011-04-29 at 09:05 +0200, Peter J. Philipp wrote:
>> You don't check for malloc failure.  I've made a patch that is possibly
>> wrong but it saves the program from SIGSEGV and replaces it with SIGABRT.

On Fri, 29 Apr 2011, Philipp Schafft wrote:
> But I have a question:
> Not all of them (only had a brief look at the patch) look to be in a
> 'safe' startup/shutdown state but code wich is run within the normal
> operation. Wouldn't it be better to handle those cases in a diffrent way
> because abort() will kill the process? Currently if it derefences NULL
> the kernel will kill the process (very likely). This patch would improve
> the situation because the behavor will be more defined wich is a big pro
> already.

Most implementations of malloc() don't return NULL except for very obvious 
cases of bad programming.
When memory is running out, malloc() may return a valid pointer, but 
writing anything in the malloc-ed data region can still result in the 
kernel killing the process.

So, although I think checking the return values is a good thing, this is 
no guarantee at all that things will always run as expected.
(Besides, when running icecast on a Linux box, there's always the risk of 
being killed by the OOM killer even when you're not doing anything wrong.)


Just my 2 cents..

-- 
Maarten