I can't say I'm a huge fan of the new libc_malloc_debug.so library
which is now required to do malloc checking:

  * Debugging features in malloc such as the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment
    variable (or the glibc.malloc.check tunable), mtrace() and mcheck()
    have now been disabled by default in the main C library.  Users
    looking to use these features now need to preload a new debugging
    DSO libc_malloc_debug.so to get this functionality back.
[from https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2021-August/129718.html]

I just added this to a project and it's a lot more work than the old way:

  
https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/362e0fdcae37db876e13b944102a5c152e6bc563

Anyway this is not the reason why I'm writing this email on Fedora
devel list.  In the Fedora package we have:

  $ rpm -qf /usr/lib64/libc_malloc_debug.so
  glibc-devel-2.34-1.fc35.x86_64
  $ rpm -qf /usr/lib64/libc_malloc_debug.so.0 
  glibc-2.34-1.fc35.x86_64

I'm wondering why it was decided to put the symlink and the file in
the two different packages?

Is it intended that end users use:

  LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libc_malloc_debug.so.0   # (1)

or

  LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libc_malloc_debug.so     # (2)

If it's (1) then that is a file, so why bother with the symlink?

If it's (2) then that's a symlink to (1), so why have the possibility
of installing only the glibc package thus getting only the file
/usr/lib64/libc_malloc_debug.so.0 which is not useful on its own?

Also is this feature intended for developers (glibc-devel) or everyone
(glibc)?  (My preference is "everyone" - we've found that asking bug
reporters to enable MALLOC_CHECK_ in an ad hoc way can be a good way
to see if a bug is a memory corruption problem.)

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests.
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v
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