Valgrind

Making it work with OO.o

Some tools such as cachegrind require a patch to fix some stack layout problems: from Naren:

--- configure.in.orig	2005-06-07 14:21:44.142756416 -0700
+++ configure.in	2005-06-07 14:27:01.717477720 -0700
@@ -77,7 +77,7 @@
      i?86) 
 	AC_MSG_RESULT([ok (${host_cpu})])
         VG_ARCH="x86"
-        KICKSTART_BASE="0xb0000000"
+        KICKSTART_BASE="0x30000000"
         ARCH_CORE_AM_CFLAGS="@PREFERRED_STACK_BOUNDARY@ -DELFSZ=32"
         ARCH_TOOL_AM_CFLAGS="@PREFERRED_STACK_BOUNDARY@"
         ARCH_CORE_AM_CCASFLAGS=""

Clearly it is necessary to run autoconf after applying that.

It may also be necessary to silence an assertion, according to Thorsten's blog entry:

--- main.c~	2005-10-04 01:28:01.000000000 +0200
+++ main.c	2005-11-24 13:46:13.000000000 +0100
@@ -274,7 +274,7 @@
    if (bb_seen_before) {
        CLG_ASSERT(ii->instr_offset == instr_offset);
        CLG_ASSERT(ii->instr_size == instrLen);
-       CLG_ASSERT(ii->data_size == dataSize);
+       //CLG_ASSERT(ii->data_size == dataSize);
        CLG_ASSERT(ii->cost_offset == *cost_offset);
        CLG_ASSERT(ii->eventset == es);
    }

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 ...

Callgrind How-To

There's a Callgrind How-To at the OOo website.

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

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

TODO: same as above.