RFA: Fix potential memory leak in gen-sframe.c

Project / Subsystem

binutils / binutils

Date

2026-07-28

Proposer

Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>

Source type

public_inbox

Consensus

Proposed

Sentiment

/10

Technical tradeoffs

  • Properly zeroing out pointers and counts after freeing memory adds a small overhead but significantly improves memory safety.
  • The fix addresses a specific error path, ensuring robustness in exception handling frame generation.

All attributes

project
binutils
subsystem
binutils
patch_id
discussion_id
87pl073358.fsf@redhat.com
source_type
public_inbox
title
RFA: Fix potential memory leak in gen-sframe.c
headline
Fix potential memory leak in gen-sframe.c
tldr
Patch cleans up sframe_xlate_ctx structure to prevent a memory leak on signal frame errors.
proposer
Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>
consensus
Proposed
outcome
proposed
sentiment_score
technical_tradeoffs
  • Properly zeroing out pointers and counts after freeing memory adds a small overhead but significantly improves memory safety.
  • The fix addresses a specific error path, ensuring robustness in exception handling frame generation.
series_id
series_role
standalone
series_parts
[]
tags
  • binutils
  • gas
  • memory leak
  • dwarf
  • exception handling
bugzilla_url
date
2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z

RFA: Fix potential memory leak in gen-sframe.c

A patch proposes to fix a potential memory leak in gas/gen-sframe.c by ensuring that upon error during signal frame processing, the sframe_xlate_ctx structure is properly cleaned up. Specifically, it suggests zeroing out dangling pointers and resetting counts after freeing memory, preventing these stale values from being copied into the output SFrame FDE and potentially causing issues during section finalization.