MALLOC_PERTURB_
MALLOC_PERTURB_ is a useful thing. If you are developing on glibc-based systems, I encourage you to put this snippet in your ~/.bash_profile:
MALLOC_PERTURB_=$(($RANDOM % 255 + 1))
export MALLOC_PERTURB_
I have been using it for the last six years on all my computers (3 laptops running every Fedora x86_64 build released since then), and while things haven’t exploded, it has helped uncover the odd bug every once in a while. One such occasion presented itself this week.
I was busy following Ondrej’s hint, debugging why Eye of GNOME was taking so long to open a file from ownCloud. Imagine my shock when it would just crash after showing the window. The same optimization was working just fine on the gnome-3-18 branch, while master was crashing even without any changes. How could that happen? Obviously, while it was failing for me, it was working fine for all those who run unstable GNOME versions via jhbuild, gnome-continous, Fedora rawhide, etc.. Otherwise we would have been debugging this crash, and not a performance issue.
I guess, most of them didn’t have MALLOC_PERTURB_.
Here is another such story.
In case you were wondering, there is already an update on its way to Fedora 24 address the crash.
Debarshi's den 
Or you can add this to ~/.jhbuildrc:
import random
os.environ[‘MALLOC_PERTURB_’] = str(random.randint(0, 255))
And use valgrind to debug 🙂
Bastien Nocera
9 April, 2016 at 12:15
Nice. I wonder if that is documented somewhere.
Debarshi Ray
11 April, 2016 at 11:17
If you put it into .bashrc how does it affect openssl certificate generation? If I remember correctly one of the causes of the debian certificate debacle was that the package modified the upstream sources to change a read from uninitialized memory (which is undefined according to the C standard) which resulted in a loss of entropy. Setting all newly allocated memory to a uniform value will have a similar effect. Having said that openssl may well have changed since then it was quite a while ago now.
Phillip Wood
10 April, 2016 at 11:33
Yeah, good point. I don’t know.
Debarshi Ray
11 April, 2016 at 11:33