ProgramLocations referring to external symbols cannot be restored from a SaveState

[sei-mwd]

Describe the bug
A ProgramLocation that has an address in the EXTERNAL_SPACE AddressSpace will not restore properly using ProgramLocation.restoreState().

The underlying problem is a few levels deep. ProgramLocation.restoreState() calls ProgramUtilities.parseAddress(), which calls ProgramDB.parseAddress(). This ends up calling DefaultAddressFactory.getAllAddresses(). This loops over a set of AddressSpaces that includes EXTERNAL_SPACE, but ignores it because space.isMemorySpace() is false for that space. There is a comment here that reads:

		for (AddressSpace space : spaces) {
			// Only parse against true physical spaces first
			if (space.isMemorySpace()) {

but the code never goes back and checks the non physical spaces. As a result, the external address string (which looks like EXTERNAL:00000001) never parses correctly, causing ProgramLocation.restoreState() to fail.

To Reproduce
In code, call ProgramLocation.saveState() on a ProgramLocation that refers to an external address. Then attempt to call ProgramLocation.restoreState() on that SaveState.

Expected behavior
Restoring ProgramLocations that have non-physical addresses should succeed.

Screenshots
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Attachments
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Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS: Linux 5.14
• Java Version: openjdk 21.0.8 2025-07-15 LTS
• Ghidra Version: 11.3.1
• Ghidra Origin: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/releases

[ghidra1]

Could you please tell me where/how you ended up with a ProgramLocation that referenced an external symbol. ProgramLocation's are intended to refer to memory locations only.

[jeffgennari]

Ah, good to know this was not an expected usage. We are saving locations for reference later. We didn't see anything in the documentation for ProgramLocation.java forbidding referencing external addresses, nothing prohibited creating such a ProgramLocation, and actually the created ProgramLocation works fine in that the go to service will go to that location in the specific program's listing. I guess the problem is that we could not save it even though we could create it.