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DieHard - Memory management babysitter prevents crashes
DieHard is a joint venture between Emery Berger at University of Mass. Amherst and Microsoft researcer Ben Zorn which is meant to prevent common memory management and allocation crashes. Its creators claim that it prevents errors known as "double frees", "single frees", "dangling pointers", and common types of buffer overflows, amongst others. Even though memory consumption may go up to 50-75% with DieHard running, it promises to protect your system without any major slowdown (as long as you have enough RAM). What does this mean for the end user? Potentially, a reduction in many common annoying crashes. Check out this demo video (AVI) to see an example of DieHard in action. At the moment it's available for Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The Windows version will only protect Firefox, while the Linux and Solaris versions will work with any application. I can see where something like this can really fit a lot of niche situations where mission critical work is being done and downtime is not an option, but that can come at a price. Not all applications are perfect, but there is a difference between good coding practices and sloppy work. However, preventing common crashes, even potentially preventing overflow attacks, can't be a bad thing, can it?
[Via Techworld]
Comments
7
Subscribe to commentsglacia00Jan 5th 2007 4:39PM
"memory consumption may go up to 50-75%"!? I run Windows, Linux, and Solaris on several machines and between them I see a crash maybe once every six months and I do some pretty deep level poking at all 3 OSs. I do agree that FF and a few other apps are a major memory hogs but they don't suck up as much memory as DieHard apparently does. I think this is a pass.
Boater805Jan 6th 2007 3:01PM
Instantly crashed my Firefox and froze my system so I had to hard force reboot by power off. This is malware of the worst form.
I'm runnng a duocore t2300 1.66 ghz w 2 gigs of ram in a fujitzu 6410, XP MCE. Very stable system. Die hard made it Die, Hard!
Boater805Jan 6th 2007 4:01PM
Instantly crashed my Firefox and froze my system so I had to hard
force reboot by power off. This is malware of the worst form.I'm
runnng a duocore t2300 1.66 ghz w 2 gigs of ram in a fujitzu 6410, XP
MCE. Very stable system. Die hard made it Die, Hard!
Arc|AngelJan 6th 2007 5:27PM
Have no firefox issues but I did in the past and I do some heavy memory intensive plugin work with firefox so I thought I'd install this. Well I went from no crashes to at least 4-5 per session including crashes on install.
I guess we should of taken former "microsoft researcher" as a warning not a resume builder :)
Emery BergerJan 7th 2007 10:21PM
Hi,
Please send any bug reports for DieHard directly to me (emery@cs.umass.edu) - I'd appreciate it. This is hardly malware (please). However, there was a problem with dual core machines that I resolved in the current release (1.0.2) - if that does not solve your problems, I'd like to know about it.
Thanks,
-- Emery Berger
John WilliamsJan 9th 2007 2:06AM
I have only been using DieHard with Firefox v2.0 for a couple of days, but I have gotten more use out of Firefox in those couple of days than I did in the previous six months.
I bought a Dell Inspiron E1705 (MP061) in July 2006 and immediately ran into trouble with Firefox (then v1.5.0.?) locking up the machine -- I mean a hard, hold the power switch down to restart, lock-up! The lockups happened so often, it started me on a search for a better browser. I eventually wound up using Opera v9.x but experienced lock-up problems
with my Dell -- just not nearly as frequent as with FireFox. When MSIE v7.0 was released, I found myself using it just because it didn't lock up the machine. But MSIE v7 is so buggy in other ways, the experience has not been enjoyable.
For these past six months, I have continued to visit various forums where users have been crying about Firefox crashing -- and crashing their computers -- but in those six months I have not seen a single solution that actually worked, until I spotted DieHard on the downloadsquad.com rss feed.
Once I got DieHard runnning with FireFox v2, it was like I had a brand new computer and browser. I'm not really a geek so I'm not too clear as to what DieHard actually does with the PC memory, but the thing sure works for me and my Dell E1705.
I'm having great fun getting reacquainted with
FireFox.
John Williams
01Jan 10th 2007 5:27PM
Running OSX 10.4.8 w/ 2gigs of RAM, I rarely run into memory probs, but still would be intrested in something like this, but an app that causes a 50-75% memory increase to PREVENT crashes seems a little counterintuative to me. It's early, so I'll keep my eye on this, but definitly needs some work.