177250 - crash during / after Palm Sync

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core Graveyard :: Palm Sync, defect)

Description

[Rajiv Dayal]

Crashes either during or after palm sync has been seen during external mozilla
community testing and using of test builds. More details of these crashes can be
found on the meta bug #155417.

This bug tracks the fixes for those crashes.

Comment 1

[Rajiv Dayal]

Palm Sync requires inter process communication between the Palm's HotSync
Manager process which loads Mozilla conduit and Mozilla process. Native MS COM
is used for this IPC. Since this is a two way communication, with Mozilla
sending back updates to its AB back to the conduit that writes it on to the
handheld device, MS COM's out parameters are required. 

For in parameters usual memory management works fine, however in case of out
parameters special memory management is required using OLE memory management
routines. But again in debug builds this is not mandatory since the debug
proxy-stub generated by MS COM MIDL and MS COM takes care of the memory access
appropriately. However, this leads to memory access issues since the out
parameters' data needs to be marshalled which is not guaranteed to work
correctly if these OLE memory management routines are 'not' used, thus causing
memory overwrites and crashes as we saw in bug #155417 appearing randomly.

Comment 2

[Rajiv Dayal]

Attachment: fix for the crash and also for category names with whitespaces

This patch fixes the crashes seen during palm sync Mozilla community testing
the details of which are on the meta bug #155417.

The patch uses OLE memory management routines instead of standard memory
management routines for MS COM Palm Sync interface "out parameters". Also as
per the rules of out-process COM memory management rules the allocation of
memory for "out parameters" is done by the called component and the memory is
freed by the caller  after it finishes using the data returned. Thus moved the
CleanUpABCOMCardStruct routine from the Mozilla Palm Sync Support module to the
Mozilla Conduit and other related code.

Comment 3

[Rajiv Dayal]

I had requested Matthew Rasnake, who tested in depth and reported the crashes on
bug #155417, to test out the new binaries with this fix. And he saw that all his
crashes are eliminated. In his own words:

" I've tested the 10/22 build with the files you sent to pop in as replacements.
i'm happy to say that the new files do appear to have eliminated all the
crashing i was seeing. she appears stable as a rock now."

:)

Sean can u please r= this one, thanks.

Comment 4

[Sean Su]

Comment on attachment 104472 [details] [diff] [review]
fix for the crash and also for category names with whitespaces

r=ssu

Comment 5

[Rajiv Dayal]

Thanks Sean for your review.

Comment 6

[Rajiv Dayal]

Thanks very much David for your super review.

Comment 7

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Comment on attachment 104472 [details] [diff] [review]
fix for the crash and also for category names with whitespaces

a=roc+moz for trunk

Comment 8

[Rajiv Dayal]

fix already checked in. Marking as fixed.

Comment 9

[Ninoschka Baca]

Trunk build 2003-02-20: WinXP
Verified Fixed. This has been fixed for awhile.