Difference between revisions of "Valgrind"

Revision as of 23:40, 4 February 2009

Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for dynamic analysis tools. It can be used to detect memory management and threading bugs and profile programs. It runs on Linux x86 and AMD64, PPC32 and PPC64 are fairly complete.

disabling the custom allocator

If you use ooo-build; export OOO_FORCE_SYSALLOC=1 before running, (this is built into linkoo's ooenv script).

If you use a Vanilla build, and your shell is setup for building ooo, use the following wrapper script around valgrind:

#!/bin/sh

# instrument soffice with a malloc-based memory allocator.
# Requires libsalalloc_malloc.so to be in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
# Forwards all command line arguments to valgrind.

export LD_PRELOAD=libsalalloc_malloc.so
valgrind $@ 

which preloads a small interceptor lib, which redirects all allocator calls to malloc.

disabling glib's custom allocator

If you want to also track down problems with glib allocated objects, e.g. resource leaks in gconfbe then you need to disable glib's custom allocation as well, e.g.

G_SLICE=always-malloc valgrind ...

more information

There's also some Writer document about Valgrind: http://tools.openoffice.org/debugging/usingvalgrind.sxw

TODO: move (!) its content here, not just copy but also remove there, so we don't end up with a fork.

TODO: Run recent version
Someone should run the latest version o OO.o, as Valgrind 3.3.0 re-introduces Hellgrind which helps e.g. to hunt down deadlocks. See [1] for more.

Callgrind Profiling How-To

There's a Callgrind How-To.