6 ms·
A memory leak in Apple's Network Extension framework
- lapcat 2y agoSee also yesterday's "Apple’s built-in macOS firewall breaks third-party firewalls" https://obdev.at/blog/apples-built-in-macos-firewall-breaks-third-party-firewalls/ https://obdev.at/blog/apples-built-in-macos-firewall-breaks-...
- hrdwdmrbl 2y agoI think this is the one that broke Time Machine for everyone with a third-party firewall wall
- isodev 2y ago> For the time being, until Apple fixes this serious bug in macOS, we therefore highly recommend to turn off the built-in firewall of macOS when also using Little Snitch or Little Snitch Mini. I remember back in the day when installing two firewalls or two antivirus programs on Windows would break it, so it will have to be reinstalled. That was 20 years ago, though, one would think we're better at making an OS by now.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoWe like to wishfully think of human systems (software, government, anything) as immune systems that accumulate knowledge in the system itself over time so that it's increasingly resilient to the systemic problems it's encountered before. Instead, human systems require eternal vigilance from the humans inside it. Even governmental systems which can encode knowledge into laws rely on the eternal vigilance of judges, prosecutors, and defenders to utilize that knowledge. So GGz if you're writing a new subsystem in an OS and you're expected to learn from mistakes a team of two people made in some subsystem 20 years ago that someone quietly patched.
- isodev 2y agoTrue, and having the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy for us to judge. The trouble is, Apple’s feedback process is so opaque that we can never know the details. All we have is the feeling of “a simple test of macOS with a third party firewall before unleashing it to the world would have shown the problem”. For a piece of software on which countless people rely upon (which macOS and iOS are), the “beta” begins after exhausting all internal means of detecting regressions and unwanted behaviour. It’s not cheap but they can’t just dump something and expect unpaid, third party developers to report all the bugs (while never getting a reply on that feedback app).
- result2vino 2y agoThey can, because it’s what happens. It just sucks for those people.
- toast0 2y agoI mean... sounds like we are if you only have to turn off one of the firewalls and not reinstall. I think ancient windows firewalls would routinely replace the system networking driver files, and that's why things got really messy. At least we're beyond that.
- DavideNL 2y ago= https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135148
- crest 2y agoAfaik the macOS port of OpenBSD's pf firewall is the only firewall used by both Apple's system settings and obdev's LittleSnitch. They're both GUI frontends to the same backend, but Apple supposedly also added internal "escape hatches" to their PF port because they couldn't be arsed to write/generate a proper ruleset with anchors to hook into. The cynic in me assumes it's just teams from different silos trampling over each other in a shared code base. Given Apple's obsession with leak prevention they're probably prohibited by NDA from talking to each other.
- jamil7 2y agoApple's frameworks, especially in betas, often have memory leaks.
- johnnythunder 2y agobase 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!
- sleepybrett 2y agobrett@algol minikube / default ~/Documents/misc sudo leaks at.obdev.littlesnitch.networkextension | grep "total leaked bytes" Password: Process 43619 is not debuggable. Due to security restrictions, leaks can only show or save contents of readonly memory of restricted processes. Process 43619: 2194911 leaks for 6742615664 total leaked bytes. jesus.
- DavideNL 2y agoProcess 575 is not debuggable. Due to security restrictions, leaks can only show or save contents of readonly memory of restricted processes. Process 575: 747950 leaks for 2294465728 total leaked bytes.
- zackmorris 2y agoI 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
- wrs 2y agoYou don’t need to do anything special to “reveal” that Apple doesn’t prioritize backwards compatibility. That is very well known. For example, standard practice for audio professionals is to wait a year or more to upgrade MacOS, to give all the vendors a chance to fix what broke.
- troupo 2y agoEven 15 years ago the common knowledge was to never upgrade to major versions of Apple software, and wait for a .2 release, at least. However, these days it seems that even point releases only introduce new bugs in the rush to deliver late features, and rarely address any issues
- baq 2y agoI have to disagree. Sequoia .0 was spectacularly broken and .1 is a very noticeable improvement. …of course I’d rather stay on Sonoma if I could go back in time…
- badgersnake 2y agoIT departments installing MDM trashware which forces upgrades is the problem.
- mh- 2y agoAnd the compliance-industrial complex that incentivizes/forces that behavior.
- louis771 2y agoJust checked, I have 6.5GB of memory leak, only running Little Snitch for two days. Ouch!
- dunham 2y agoYeah, I stopped using it because of that.
- gabeio 2y agoDamn if only they told us yesterday before I restarted for the first time in a month. I wonder how big my memory leak would have been. I have only been online for about 11 hours (~9 of those were in hibernation) now and already at a 13MB leak.
- baq 2y agoI’ve been restarting my MacBook weekly for 2 years now. It’s way more than I’ve done this with Windows.
- ngcc_hk 2y agoI reported that to them and at least based on the interaction they have no idea for last few months. I just have to restart them or the whole MacBook Air from time to time. I suspect it is not their issue lately as I saw others have this issues. Well … now I know. Or may be I just guess.
- danhon 2y agoEeesh. Process 665: 874477 leaks for 2686387600 total leaked bytes.
- herpdyderp 2y agoThis must be why my system becomes increasingly unstable over time ever since I upgraded to Sequoia. I've had to reboot quite regularly.
- blacksmith_tb 2y agoI generally don't sleep my macOS machines these days, as hardware has gotten faster and faster, the pain of booting up is less and less. Unless I want to be able to wake on network etc., at least.
- kstrauser 2y agoSame for me! On my laptop, Safari will eventually stop loading web pages after a few days of uptime, guaranteed, until I reboot. I hadn't had that on my Mac Studio, but it has much more RAM to endure the leakage longer.
- switch007 2y ago[flagged]
- userbinator 2y agoMake 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.
- SG- 2y agomeanwhile 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.
- foundart 2y agoThe Lulu download page says "Apple also broke many aspects of networking in macOS 15 (Sequoia). Until Apple releases a fix, the solution for now appears to be to disable the macOS firewall." Presumably doing that would likely also work around the problem for littlesnitch?
- teruakohatu 2y agoOuch! I have 20 days uptime and 3.2GB of memory leaks!
- dwaite 2y agoKinda 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?)
- kbtombul 2y agoA memory leak is essentially when a program uses more and more memory because it loses track of some of it so it can't give it back to the OS. You're thinking of another kind of leak.
- saagarjha 2y agoNot entirely sure you are upset when people do exactly what Apple has been telling everyone to do for years if they want their bug fixed
- Khaine 2y agoDoes Apple actually do QA? They really need to do another snow leopard release, where there are no new features, just bug fixing.
- lxgr 2y agoDefinitely: They do try to avoid breaking their own first-party apps. Now third-party apps...
- nspassov 2y agoYet another reason why I should not be updating from Sonoma...
- rasz 2y agoNow we know why they bumped Macs to 16GB minimum ;-)