The Old New Thing

Mismatching scalar and vector new and delete

February 3, 2004 Feb 3, 2004 02/3/04

Raymond Chen

In a previous entry I alluded to the problems that can occur if you mismatch scalar "new" with vector "delete[]" or vice versa. There is a nice description of C++ memory management in C++ Gotchas: Avoiding Common Problems in Coding and Design on www.informit.com, and I encourage you to read at least the section titled Failure to ...

The format of string resources

January 30, 2004 Jan 30, 2004 01/30/04

Raymond Chen

Organized in bundles.

Integer overflow in the new[] operator

January 29, 2004 Jan 29, 2004 01/29/04

Raymond Chen

Integer overflows are becoming a new security attack vector. Mike Howard's article discusses some of the ways you can protect yourself against integer overflow attacks. One attack vector he neglects to mention is integer overflow in the new[] operator. This operator performs an implicit multiplication that is unchecked: int *...

Another reason not to do anything scary in your DllMain: Inadvertent deadlock

January 28, 2004 Jan 28, 2004 01/28/04

Raymond Chen

Your DllMain function runs inside the loader lock, one of the few times the OS lets you run code while one of its internal locks is held. This means that you must be extra careful not to violate a lock hierarchy in your DllMain; otherwise, you are asking for a deadlock. (You do have a lock hierarchy in your DLL, right?) The loader lock ...

Some reasons not to do anything scary in your DllMain

January 27, 2004 Jan 27, 2004 01/27/04

Raymond Chen

As everybody knows by now, you're not supposed to do anything even remotely interesting in your DllMain function. Oleg Lvovitch has written two very good articles about this, one about how things work, and one about what goes wrong when they don't work. Here's another reason not to do anything remotely interesting in your DllMain: It's ...

The hollow brush

January 26, 2004 Jan 26, 2004 01/26/04

Raymond Chen

What is the hollow brush for? The hollow brush is a brush that doesn't do anything. You can use it when you're forced to use a brush but you don't want to. As one example, you can use it as your class brush. Then when your program stops responding and Windows decide to do the "white flash" (see yesterday's entry), it grabs the hollow brush ...

ia64 – misdeclaring near and far data

January 20, 2004 Jan 20, 2004 01/20/04

Raymond Chen

As I mentioned yesterday, the ia64 is a very demanding architecture. Today I'll discuss another way that lying to the compiler will come back and bite you. The ia64 does not have an absolute addressing mode. Instead, you access your global variables through the r1 register, nicknamed "gp" (global pointer). This register always points to your ...

Uninitialized garbage on ia64 can be deadly

January 19, 2004 Jan 19, 2004 01/19/04

Raymond Chen

On Friday, we talked about some of the bad things that can happen if you call a function with the wrong signature. The ia64 introduces yet another possible bad consequence of a mismatched function signature which you may have thought was harmless. The CreateThread function accepts a LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE, which has the function signature ...

How can a program survive a corrupted stack?

January 16, 2004 Jan 16, 2004 01/16/04

Raymond Chen

Continuing from yesterday: The x86 architecture traditionally uses the EBP register to establish a stack frame. A typical function prologue goes like this: push ebp ; save old ebp mov ebp, esp ; establish new ebp sub esp, nn*4 ; local variables push ebx ; must be preserved for caller push esi ; must be ...

What can go wrong when you mismatch the calling convention?

January 15, 2004 Jan 15, 2004 01/15/04

Raymond Chen

Believe it or not, calling conventions is one of the things that programs frequently get wrong. The compiler yells at you when you mismatch a calling convention, but lazy programmers will just stick a cast in there to get the compiler to "shut up already". And then Windows is stuck having to support your buggy code forever. The window ...