FEATURE_CLEAN_UP is a configuration feature to get busybox to explicitly
call free() on dynamic allocated memory just before exiting so memory leak
detectors like valgrind don't get confused. Upstream explicitly recommends
to NOT enable this option:
config FEATURE_CLEAN_UP
bool "Clean up all memory before exiting (usually not needed)"
default n
help
As a size optimization, busybox normally exits without explicitly
freeing dynamically allocated memory or closing files. This saves
space since the OS will clean up for us, but it can confuse debuggers
like valgrind, which report tons of memory and resource leaks.
Don't enable this unless you have a really good reason to clean
things up manually.
Having this option enabled adds a bit of bloat, but more significantly these
cleanup code paths don't get tested very often so some times get out of sync
with the allocation code which can lead to crashes (or security issues from
double frees), so it is safer to disable the option.
For people wanting to debug memory leak issues with busybox, the option can
still be enabled with a configuration fragment (or a custom config).
The size difference isn't huge (br-arm-full-static):
-rwxr-xr-x 1 peko peko 886K Jul 5 10:56 output-busybox1/target/bin/busybox
-rwxr-xr-x 1 peko peko 882K Jul 5 10:53 output-busybox2/target/bin/busybox
Signed-off-by: Peter Korsgaard <peter@korsgaard.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>
(cherry picked from commit
15e8e721f6e391c7aa397f3081b7970fe8bbcab9)
Signed-off-by: Peter Korsgaard <peter@korsgaard.com>
projects / coffee / buildroot.git / commitdiff