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I have three lines (version) of a linux product. V1 works fine in the customer. V2 and V3
crashed and the fix seems to be a memset call after a malloc call.
What is the deeper explanation on this topic? Why memset resolved the issue?
My guess without a code example is that you were operating on the buffer or struct you malloc’d with assumptions that its contents would be initialized with certain default values. Malloc doesn’t initialize the memory it hands back, so unless you memset or use some other initialization, the values in that memory could be anything, and therefore, if you’re trying to check a pointer assuming it’d be NULL or that an int will be zero, you can’t make that assumption without initializing the memory first.