A memory leak in Apple's Network Extension framework

(obdev.at)

Comments

SG- 14 November 2024
meanwhile my Lulu alternative to littlesnitch is barely leaking anything after running for weeks:

sudo leaks com.objective-see.lulu.extension | grep "total leaked bytes" Password: Process 851 is not debuggable. Due to security restrictions, leaks can only show or save contents of readonly memory of restricted processes.

Process 851: 1086 leaks for 108576 total leaked bytes.

zackmorris 14 November 2024
I wish there was an independent unit test suite for operating systems and other proprietary software.

The suite would run the most-used apps and utilities against updates and report regressions.

So for example, the vast majority of apps on my Mac can't run, because they were written for early versions of OS X and OS 9, even all the way back to System 7 when apps were expected to still run on 4/5/6. The suite would reveal that Apple has a track record of de-prioritizing backwards compatibility or backporting bug fixes to previous OS versions.

Edit: integration test suite

johnnythunder 14 November 2024
base sudo leaks at.obdev.littlesnitch.networkextension | grep "total leaked bytes" Password: Process 310 is not debuggable. Due to security restrictions, leaks can only show or save contents of readonly memory of restricted processes.

Process 310: 314990 leaks for 967643488 total leaked bytes.

Ouch!

Khaine 15 November 2024
Does Apple actually do QA? They really need to do another snow leopard release, where there are no new features, just bug fixing.
louis771 14 November 2024
Just checked, I have 6.5GB of memory leak, only running Little Snitch for two days. Ouch!
jamil7 14 November 2024
Apple's frameworks, especially in betas, often have memory leaks.
herpdyderp 14 November 2024
This must be why my system becomes increasingly unstable over time ever since I upgraded to Sequoia. I've had to reboot quite regularly.
lapcat 14 November 2024
See also yesterday's "Apple’s built-in macOS firewall breaks third-party firewalls" https://obdev.at/blog/apples-built-in-macos-firewall-breaks-...
teruakohatu 14 November 2024
Ouch! I have 20 days uptime and 3.2GB of memory leaks!
danhon 14 November 2024
Eeesh.

Process 665: 874477 leaks for 2686387600 total leaked bytes.

userbinator 14 November 2024
Make it harder to use the original way, push developers to a suboptimal mechanism and deprecate the original way, then eventually deprecate and remove extensions entirely.

"See? This is why extensions are bad!"

It's 100% in Apple's culture to do so. They don't even need to do it deliberately --- just ignore the inevitable bugs that appear.

rasz 15 November 2024
Now we know why they bumped Macs to 16GB minimum ;-)
nspassov 15 November 2024
Yet another reason why I should not be updating from Sonoma...
dwaite 15 November 2024
Kinda lousy that they tell people to open additional feedbacks when they gave no information about the behavior they are actually seeing with network extensions (leaking where? what sort of data?)