Author Topic: ERROR: Could not load in 2_CommandBrief-mb!  (Read 8033 times)

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Offline niffiwan

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Re: ERROR: Could not load in 2_CommandBrief-mb!
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And then when I ran it in a debugger, it didn't crash at all  :sigh:

GDB disables ASLR (Address Stack Layout Randomization, or something like that. It's a security "feature" to make stack smashing harder). This sounds like the kind of randomness that comes with buffer overflows. Have you tried running valgrind or memcheck on it to see if it turns up with anything?

Edit: In case you were curious, the reason ASLR is important is because AFAIK it's implemented as just some random stack pushes. So a buffer overflow might result in junk data being overwritten or something important like the saved instruction pointer being overwritten, resulting in the crash. Has running it from the command line ever resulted in an error message along the lines of "stack smashing detected"?
Also, Valgrind might make the program run pretty slow, so it could be worth looking into compiling it with gcc stack protection to see where/when the buffer overflows actually occur. But I digress quite a bit, this is probably a discussion for a proper bug report somewhere other than the BluePlanet subforum.

It was many months ago, but my memory says I was just getting segmentation faults.  Yes, some sort of buffer overflows seem likely, I just haven't spent the time yet to track it down any further.

FYI - in case you're interested, the source is here: http://sourceforge.net/p/alliance/pcs2/ci/master/tree/

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It's incomplete to the point of being literally unusable; last I heard, none of the GUI elements were coded to actually do anything yet.
This. I just checked the source and everything in the editors directory is like 10 lines of code, so I'm guess it was all just framework and placeholder code. Running the application doesn't even result in a blank mission, it just tiles my GTK default background and gives me some buttons to push, which of course don't do anything.

Not entirely true - some of the buttons cause errors to appear! :D
Creating a fs2_open.log | Red Alert Bug = Hex Edit | MediaVPs 2014: Bigger HUD gauges | 32bit libs for 64bit Ubuntu
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Debian Packages (testing/unstable): Freespace2 | wxLauncher
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m|m: I think I'm suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Bmpman is starting to make sense and it's actually written reasonably well...