Answering a begging question... what does the heap look like?

So I was curious. What does a process' heap look like? If I were to take a hint from conservative garbage collectors, and scan the memory of a process, what would it look like? Well, to answer this, I threw together some software here, and ran a few GNU programs to see what they look like. I then try to relate memory allocation calls with the heap layout. The conservative garbage collector hint I used was merely the following. When my tool scans the heap, address by address, if the value at each address looks like another address residing in the heap, then my tool says the heap address points to the other address. Anyways the results are munged to crap out a .dot file. More details and such are here.

-Matt

Of Sheep and Orbits

Wow, so last week, I added another ring to the Matt-tree. Yeah, I got a bit older. But it seems that age is just a gross estimate of maturity, knowledge, and health. I feel that is a misnomer. Age is just the amount of times you have orbited the sun given you are based here on the Earth.

Also, Digital Forensics Magazine just published an article I wrote, "Of Sheep & Heap," in their most recent issue (Issue number 5). I must add, their acquisitions department was a blast to work with. Much props to Roy Isbell over there!

-Matt