Hi Pascal,

Thanks for the quick feedback.  My intention is to reallocate the memory each 
time I load a new file.

I have a structure called preferences that holds all of the parsed preference 
values.  Just after allocation the pointer to the allocated area is as per 
sub_packet in this screenshot:

[cid:image003.jpg@01D20F7D.BB3C1010]

Note that tsumenabled (a gboolean) is TRUE.  When I enter the dissector for the 
first time the pointer is still good:

[cid:image004.jpg@01D20F7D.BB3C1010]

tsumenabled is still TRUE.  But when code that updates a value in the 
sub_packet array is executed I get this:

[cid:image005.jpg@01D20F7D.BB3C1010]

Note how tsumenabled has been zapped to FALSE.

I reckon my memory allocation has been freed somewhere.  Doing a search across 
the entire solution in Visual Studio I can’t help noticing that there are no 
other uses of wmem_alloc(wmem_file_scope(), ….) which is a bit worrying.

I’ll redesign the code to use the epan scope and try that.

Best regards…Paul

From: wireshark-dev-boun...@wireshark.org 
[mailto:wireshark-dev-boun...@wireshark.org] On Behalf Of Pascal Quantin
Sent: 15 September 2016 17:49
To: Developer support list for Wireshark <wireshark-dev@wireshark.org>
Subject: Re: [Wireshark-dev] I need wmem_alloc advice please

Hi Paul,

2016-09-15 18:44 GMT+02:00 Paul Offord 
<paul.off...@advance7.com<mailto:paul.off...@advance7.com>>:
My porting of TRANSUM from LUA to C continues.  I now have a working dissector 
but I then read README.developer and noted the guidance regarding use of static 
buffers.  I assume this applies to arrays too and so I’m now trying to convert 
the statically defined arrays to versions based on dynamic memory allocation.  
I’ve converted some string buffers and a simple gboolean array without 
problems.  I then tried to convert an array of structures and this caused 
crashes all over the place.

Before the conversion I had this as a global variable:

    PKT_INFO sub_packet[MAX_SUBPKTS_PER_PACKET];

I replaced this with a global variable:

    PKT_INFO *sub_packet;

And this in my init function:

    sub_packet = (PKT_INFO *)wmem_alloc(wmem_file_scope(), 
(MAX_SUBPKTS_PER_PACKET * sizeof(PKT_INFO)));

I subsequently use it like this:

    sub_packet[i].frame_number = 0;

I seem to be getting memory corruption as a result of this change.  Weird 
things happen, like I lose preference variables.

What am I doing wrong here?

File scope memory is automatically freed each time a preference is changed, or 
a file is reloaded. If you need to keep some things persistent during all 
Wireshark instance, consider using epan scope memory for those variables 
instead.
Regards,
Pascal.

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