Do a little trolling - Githubissues

Elsklivet commented 1 year ago

The actual core of this project is to have the allocator do something annoying on purpose when a block is allocated or freed. My original idea was to do one of the following:

On each call to malloc, free a random block (or don't)
On each call to free, sometimes just don't actually free it
On each call to malloc, make the allocation just slightly bigger or smaller than requested
On each call to malloc, pick a different allocated block and return a pointer to that
On each call to free, free a completely different block

I think one or all of the above would be neat. Several require some randomness, which is why xorshift is present in the codebase, but perhaps a better solution exists (without using a crate). Maybe direct bindings to C?

[x] In any case, one or all of the above must be implemented for trolloc to be ready for release

Elsklivet commented 9 months ago

Simple trolling (sometimes free on alloc) has been added to both MVP and the GlobalAlloc version, but I'm leaving this issue open for inspiration to troll even more.

Elsklivet commented 6 months ago

Other ideas:

Make the allocator overwrite the data instead of freeing it
Make the allocator swap data between two allocated blocks
- Maybe by using type information to ensure dereferences are aligned and valid (@chris-hinson)
Make wait times abhorrently slow by using a terribly optimized data structure (@chris-hinson)

Elsklivet commented 6 months ago

Another notable issue is that currently, the trolling is not parametric and happens too often to be a subtle troll. We should raise the threshold required to trigger trolling, whatever it is, to make this pass more often.

chris-hinson commented 6 months ago

Another notable issue is that currently, the trolling is not parametric and happens too often to be a subtle troll. We should raise the threshold required to trigger trolling, whatever it is, to make this pass more often.

I like the idea of tying the likelyhood of a troll event to some combination of time since last troll event (measured as discrete number of allocs + frees) and number of currently successfully allocated blocks

Elsklivet / trolloc

Do a little trolling #4