Message-ID:	<363B3B4E.1BE2FEC9@montana.com>
Date:	Sat, 31 Oct 1998 09:31:10 -0700
From:	bowman <bowman AT montana DOT com>
X-Mailer:	Mozilla 4.5b2 [en] (Win95; I)
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MIME-Version:	1.0
To:	Peter Palotas <blizzar AT hem1 DOT passagen DOT se>,
	"djgpp AT delorie DOT com" <djgpp AT delorie DOT com>
CC:	djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com, "J.J. Alcolea" <a920101 AT zipi DOT fi DOT upm DOT es>
Subject:	Re: ANNOUNCE: MSS version 1.1
References:	<199808241456 DOT KAA17618 AT delorie DOT com>
Reply-To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com

Peter Palotas wrote:
> 
> The purpose of this message is to announce the release of
> MSS - Memory Supervision System version 1.1
> MSS Version 1.1 has a few new features and a lot of bugs corrected
> that were present in version 1.0 Beta.
>
> This also goes for the excellent DJGPP, the DOS port of GCC. If your compiler is a
> 32-bit compiler for the i386 family of processors, building MSS should be
> no problems, other platforms are untested, but any reports of successful
> (or unsuccessful) usage of MSS are very welcome.

This is a report from one happy user. The malloc/free package in the
2.02 beta does not tolerate any overruns of an allocated buffer. This is
as it should be, but the old version had more slack and would not
highlite the problem.

I patched up a version of malloc and linked it in, and I could find the
problem area, but could not quite isolate the offending code. I
downloaded 'dmalloc' and hacked the Makefile so it would build, but
couldn't get it to write a logfile. A check of the archives on
www.delorie.com showed a reference to MSS. I downloaded it and built it
cleanly following the very clear instructions. I only kick myself that I
didn't download and use it when I first saw the announcement.

After modifying the source and makefile as instructed, I ran the
software, and got more info than I really needed. After rtfm a little
more, I turned off the normal messages, and wound up with three warning
of overwritten fenceposts, pointing right at the code in question. 

Good work! This is a great tool, and I'm sure with the stricter 2.02
implementation, it will be a very popular one.  Now, back to cleaning up
the code; MSS spotlights many problems which may slide by vnow only to
break on a future version of the library.

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