ASLR sometimes stops working on Vista with 1.7? [was: Re: Cygwin 1.7 release (was ...)]

[Yaakov (Cygwin/X)]

On 04/06/2009 11:09, Charles Wilson wrote:
> Well, you can never be SURE. I'd be surprised tho. I use AVG 8.5, which
> doesn't cause any problems on my cygwin-1.5 installation under Vista,
> nor on XP. Nobody has ever reported it as a BLODA before, AFAICT.  It
> does do on-access scanning, which means it hooks in to the file-access
> machinery just like other BLODAs (although I've turned that off for my
> cygwin-1.7 and -1.5 trees, not that doing THAT would make any difference
> to a true BLODA).  What I can't figure out is, if AVG were at fault, why
> it would always "attack" my cygwin-1.7 tree, but never interfere with my
> cygwin-1.5 tree on the same disk.  I can even run automake from a
> cygwin-1.7 shell and watch it die, and immediately run automake from a
> cygwin-1.5 shell in the same directory and it succeeds...so if it's a
> BLODA, it's got a jones for cygwin-1.7.

I'm having similar problems with Avast 4.8 Home Edition on Windows 7 RC 
x64 with cygwin-1.7.  I never had a problem with this A/V on XP with 1.5 
or 1.7.  This continues even after rebaseall and peflagsall.  I have yet 
to try removing Avast.

> In any event, since the remap problem happens in violation of everything
> MS says ASLR is supposed to do, I blame Vista (or maybe
> possible-BLODA-interfering-with-ASLR directly, not with cygwin itself).
> I can inspect the new (randomized) base addresses of the ASLR-marked
> DLLs after each reboot by looking at running processes using the
> sysinternals process viewer.  They are (a) random and (b)
> non-overlapping. But when the "*** failed to remap" occurs, I can
> inspect the hung process and sure enough, foo.dll is loaded in some
> strange place in memory that is NOT where ASLR promised to put it (and
> there is no obvious conflicting DLL loaded where foo.dll was supposed to
> go).

Leave it to MS to mess us up again...


Yaakov

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