Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 test1 -- need some help
Gene C.
czar at czarc.net
Mon Jan 19 18:33:45 UTC 2004
On Monday 19 January 2004 12:17, Michael K. Johnson wrote:
> A test release of Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 is now available at
> ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/test/0.96/x86_64/
> and at distinguised mirror sites near you.
Timely, timely ... I could claim that I have extremely high bandwidth and have
gotten the ISOs and installed already but that would not be true ... I
cheated and downloaded them from Justin's development site a couple of days
ago.
The system -- Opteron 140 with test1 installed plus needed updates such as
gcc.
I am trying to get the nessus security tool to run as a 64 bit application
(the 32 bit version needs the 32bit versions of openssl, tcp-wrappers, and
gtk to install ... besides, where is the fun of just doing that). Instead I
have embarked on a "learning experience".
Nessus is a relatively large application which makes extensive use of dynamic
memory allocation (malloc), multiple small quick running processes (a couple
thousand for a typical test), and the mmap function [more on this later].
1. I am running a patched gcc because the regular one gets into a compiler
loop [thanks Jakub for the fix] ... I really need to rebuild the "-6" release
but was hoping this would be done by Red Hat sooner rather than later.
2. I have patches applied to nessus which were developed by SUSE and are
available in their 9.0 Professional for the AMD64. These patches correct
pointer/cast/type/prototype problems and also work fine on the i386. There
are still some pointer/cast related problems to result but this a big start.
3. I have identified and corrected at least one problem where sizeof is used
for the wrong struct resulting in a SEGV [again, thanks Jakub for pointing
out the problem].
4. Because of the very dynamic nature of running nessus, gdb and/or ddd have
not proven as useful as I would like ... I am resorting to putting lots of
printf/fprintf statements into the code to get debugging information.
5. As of now, the code "sort of" works. However, I am getting lots and lots
of memory allocation errors (results in an error message to stdout/stderr via
perror()). All of these are malloc errors directly or (indirectly) through
mmap.
6. I have started to look at the mmap problem to begin somewhere. The
strange thing is that mmap seems to work OK most of the time but sometimes
(and it appears to be repeatable) is gets a "Memory allocation" error. I
extracted one of the functions having a problem with a particular file and
put it into a small test program ... naturally, it works just fine.
While this could be the result of some strange gcc or glibc problem, I am
assuming that the problem is something nessus is doing. Any
hints/suggestions on how to approach debugging this?
BTW, this code (as patched) runs just fine on the i386. I also tested nessus
on SUSE's 9.0 amd64 system and it seems to have the same/similar memory
allocation problems.
--
Gene
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