freebsd-ports/devel/ElectricFence/pkg-descr
David E. O'Brien 2105b45073 Fix bad reference.
PR:		35977
Submitted by:	Slaven Rezic <slaven.rezic@berlin.de>
2002-03-16 17:25:07 +00:00

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Electric Fence is a different kind of malloc() debugger. It uses the virtual
memory hardware of your system to detect when software overruns the boundaries
of a malloc() buffer. It will also detect any accesses of memory that has
been released by free(). Because it uses the VM hardware for detection,
Electric Fence stops your program on the first instruction that causes
a bounds violation. It's then trivial to use a debugger to display the
offending statement.
It will probably port to any ANSI/POSIX system that provides mmap(), and
mprotect(), as long as mprotect() has the capability to turn off all access
to a memory page, and mmap() can use /dev/zero or the MAP_ANONYMOUS flag
to create virtual memory pages.
Complete information on the use of Electric Fence is in the manual page
efence(3).