Re: [PATCH 3/3] clone: Free a few paths

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 14, 2011, 19:45 UTC
Message-ID: <20110314194501.GA30483@elie>
In-Reply-To: <1300130318-11279-4-git-send-email-cmn@elego.de>

Hi,

Carlos Martín Nieto wrote:

> Free the path, repo, dir buffers
> 
> Signed-off-by: Carlos Martín Nieto <cmn@elego.de>

[...]

Show 6 quoted lines

> +	free(dir);
> +	free(repo);
> +	free(path);
>  	strbuf_release(&reflog_msg);
>  	strbuf_release(&branch_top);
>  	strbuf_release(&key);

Thanks. The commit message should probably mention that this is for the sake of valgrind rather a true memory leak, since the memory is freed by _exit at the appropriate time already.

The patch itself seems sane, since the performance effect should be negligible.

But it reminds me: does "valgrind --tool=memcheck" provide a way to annotate allocations like these? In other words, is it be possible to have functions xmalloc_permanent and xstrdup_permanent that

 * allocate a buffer that is never meant to be freed;
 * do not cause valgrind to complain;
 * could be reimplemented some day by taking allocations from a large
   contiguous pool, to avoid malloc overhead and to take advantage of
   the knowledge that these allocations never need to be freed

Curious, Jonathan