Re: [Libguestfs] [PATCH 2/2] virt-format: fix possible memory leak

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 09:39:17PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote: > On 01/31/2012 09:30 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > >> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 06:19:32PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote: >>> The strdup/strndup() introduces malloc() to allocate memory, >>> so we need to free them carefully. >> >> I'm not sure this patch is necessary. >> >> We already check for memory leaks in many utilities (in 'make >> extra-tests'), but we only do it for the success case. If the utility >> fails, it's better that it just exits as soon as possible, even if it >> doesn't free all memory along the way. > > > But I wonder that if fail, where will the allocated memory go? not a leak? The operating system recovers memory from all processes that call _exit(2). There is no need to free any of it. But we do want to know if the library is leaking memory, which would be a problem for people using libguestfs, which is why we perform leak tests in the non-failure case.

[...] > make extra-tests can test virt-format, too, it seems not? It's tested: Makefile.am: $(RUN_VG) ../../format/virt-format -a test1.img >/dev/null Rich.