555894 - Don't use static strings when setting environment variables

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit Graveyard :: XULRunner, defect)

Description

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Attachment: Patch

(Not exactly a xulrunner issue, but one of the XRE)

On most unix systems, I think, "putting" an environment variable (as in putenv) just adds a reference to the string that was passed as an argument. When using heap allocated strings, it obviously can fail after free()ing, but in XRE case, it uses static strings. One could think this is okay, except these strings are in libxul.so, and libxul.so is dlclose()d when terminating.

On xulrunner builds of firefox, I was getting systematic segmentation faults when running firefox with an already opened window: the second instance would load libxul.so, send its xremote command, dlclose libxul.so then crash because the environment strings were now pointing to unmapped memory.

Comment 1

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Comment on attachment 435827 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

looks fine to me, though would like :bs to sr this since it's in xre code

Comment 2

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/dfca7a38cb50