macOS Malloc headache -- how to debug?

mpemburn · Jul 15, 2009

Hi Folks,

In the scanning app I'm working on, I'm getting the following error when I send the signal to cancel the scan operation:

MyScan(25156,0xa046b720) malloc: *** free() called with 0x1add80 with refcount 0
MyScan(25156,0xa046b720) malloc: *** auto malloc[25156]: agc error for object 0x1add80: Deallocating a non-block

I'm not calling malloc() or free() anywhere so I'm guessing this must be happening in one of the dylibs I link to. How can I discover which one?

Some background:
The app uses the SANE API for image acquisition, which is written in C so I have to mix in C calls and data types to get it to work. My "Scan" object runs in a separate thread using NSOperation and the "sane_cancel()" command is called from the main thread. The command is trapped like this:

Code:

while (status == SANE_STATUS_GOOD) {
	status = sane_read (saneHandle,lineBuffer,maxlength,&bytesReturned);
	//*** Exit loop if a sane_canel() order is issued
	if (status == SANE_STATUS_CANCELLED) {
		break;
	}
	[dataBuffer appendBytes: lineBuffer length: bytesReturned];
}

Thanks in advance,

-- Mark

Sander · Jul 19, 2009

We'll probably need some more context here. You could do some "old-fashined printf-logging" in the code _after_ the while loop you're showing, to find out where exactly things are going wrong. It doesn't seem to be that the sane_cancel() call invalidates handles or anything, but I must admit I only quickly browsed through the SANE documentation. It does mention that the SANE API does not require any other operations to be re-entrant, so a frontend must not call any other operation until the cancelled operation has returned. Perhaps in addition to calling sane_cancel() from the main thread you're also doing something else?

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macOS Malloc headache -- how to debug?

mpemburn

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Sander

macrumors 6502a

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