Re: Breakage with glib-2.76.0 (exposes bugs in buggy packages)

Sam James <[email protected]> Fri, 17 Mar 2023 14:29:35 +0000

Newsgroups	dev.linux.lists.distributions
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Sam James <[email protected]> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> Hi folks,
>
> glib-2.76 switches from using its own 'slice' allocator to using
> the system malloc instead.
>
> This ends up exposing various memory safety bugs in consumers
> of glib, including some XFCE software.
>
> So far:
> - openbox (https://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6669)
> - xfce4-session (https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/-/issues/166) 
> - xfce4-screensaver (https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-screensaver/-/issues/119)
> - thunar (https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/-/issues/1063)
> - gegl (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gegl/-/issues/320)
> - girara (https://git.pwmt.org/pwmt/girara/-/issues/17)
> - tint2 (not yet reported upstream, https://bugs.gentoo.org/901775)
>
> See also:
> -
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=901805&hide_resolved=0
> - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/2937
> - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/2941
>
> You can try see these issues with older glib by using Valgrind (which
> makes glib on older versions disable the slice allocator) or ASAN.

To be explicit, you can do this with <glib-2.76:
```
$ export G_SLICE=always-malloc
$ some-application
```

Or just valgrind in the usual way, etc.

> I anticipate there'll be quite a few more of these.
>
> best,
> sam
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

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