This section describes the Valgrind core services, flags and behaviours. That means it is relevant regardless of what particular tool you are using. A point of terminology: most references to "valgrind" in the rest of this section (Section 2) refer to the valgrind core services. Valgrind is designed to be as non-intrusive as possible. It works directly with existing executables. You don't need to recompile, relink, or otherwise modify, the program to be checked. Simply put valgrind --tool=tool_name at the start of the command line normally used to run the program. For example, if want to run the command ls -l using the heavyweight memory-checking tool Memcheck, issue the command: (Memcheck is the default, so if you want to use it you can actually omit the --tool flag. Regardless of which tool is in use, Valgrind takes control of your program before it starts. Debugging information is read from the executable and associated libraries, so that error messages and other outputs can be phrased in terms of source code locations (if that is appropriate). Your program is then run on a synthetic CPU provided by the Valgrind core. As new code is executed for the first time, the core hands the code to the selected tool. The tool adds its own instrumentation code to this and hands the result back to the core, which coordinates the continued execution of this instrumented code. The amount of instrumentation code added varies widely between tools. At one end of the scale, Memcheck adds code to check every memory access and every value computed, increasing the size of the code at least 12 times, and making it run 25-50 times slower than natively. At the other end of the spectrum, the ultra-trivial "none" tool (a.k.a. Nulgrind) adds no instrumentation at all and causes in total "only" about a 4 times slowdown. Valgrind simulates every single instruction your program executes. Because of this, the active tool checks, or profiles, not only the code in your application but also in all supporting dynamically-linked (.so-format) libraries, including the GNU C library, the X client libraries, Qt, if you work with KDE, and so on. If you're using one of the error-detection tools, Valgrind will often detect errors in libraries, for example the GNU C or X11 libraries, which you have to use. You might not be interested in these errors, since you probably have no control over that code. Therefore, Valgrind allows you to selectively suppress errors, by recording them in a suppressions file which is read when Valgrind starts up. The build mechanism attempts to select suppressions which give reasonable behaviour for the libc and XFree86 versions detected on your machine. To make it easier to write suppressions, you can use the --gen-suppressions=yes option which tells Valgrind to print out a suppression for each error that appears, which you can then copy into a suppressions file. Different error-checking tools report different kinds of errors. The suppression mechanism therefore allows you to say which tool or tool(s) each suppression applies to. First off, consider whether it might be beneficial to recompile your application and supporting libraries with debugging info enabled (the -g flag). Without debugging info, the best Valgrind tools will be able to do is guess which function a particular piece of code belongs to, which makes both error messages and profiling output nearly useless. With -g, you'll hopefully get messages which point directly to the relevant source code lines. Another flag you might like to consider, if you are working with C++, is -fno-inline. That makes it easier to see the function-call chain, which can help reduce confusion when navigating around large C++ apps. For whatever it's worth, debugging OpenOffice.org with Memcheck is a bit easier when using this flag. You don't have to do this, but doing so helps Valgrind produce more accurate and less confusing error reports. Chances are you're set up like this already, if you intended to debug your program with GNU gdb, or some other debugger. This paragraph applies only if you plan to use Memcheck: On rare occasions, optimisation levels at -O2 and above have been observed to generate code which fools Memcheck into wrongly reporting uninitialised value errors. We have looked in detail into fixing this, and unfortunately the result is that doing so would give a further significant slowdown in what is already a slow tool. So the best solution is to turn off optimisation altogether. Since this often makes things unmanagably slow, a plausible compromise is to use -O. This gets you the majority of the benefits of higher optimisation levels whilst keeping relatively small the chances of false complaints from Memcheck. All other tools (as far as we know) are unaffected by optimisation level. Valgrind understands both the older "stabs" debugging format, used by gcc versions prior to 3.1, and the newer DWARF2 format used by gcc 3.1 and later. We continue to refine and debug our debug-info readers, although the majority of effort will naturally enough go into the newer DWARF2 reader. When you're ready to roll, just run your application as you would normally, but place valgrind --tool=tool_name in front of your usual command-line invocation. Note that you should run the real (machine-code) executable here. If your application is started by, for example, a shell or perl script, you'll need to modify it to invoke Valgrind on the real executables. Running such scripts directly under Valgrind will result in you getting error reports pertaining to /bin/sh, /usr/bin/perl, or whatever interpreter you're using. This may not be what you want and can be confusing. You can force the issue by giving the flag --trace-children=yes, but confusion is still likely. Valgrind tools write a commentary, a stream of text, detailing error reports and other significant events. All lines in the commentary have following form: The 12345 is the process ID. This scheme makes it easy to distinguish program output from Valgrind commentary, and also easy to differentiate commentaries from different processes which have become merged together, for whatever reason. By default, Valgrind tools write only essential messages to the commentary, so as to avoid flooding you with information of secondary importance. If you want more information about what is happening, re-run, passing the -v flag to Valgrind. You can direct the commentary to three different places: The default: send it to a file descriptor, which is by default 2 (stderr). So, if you give the core no options, it will write commentary to the standard error stream. If you want to send it to some other file descriptor, for example number 9, you can specify --log-fd=9. A less intrusive option is to write the commentary to a file, which you specify by --log-file=filename. Note carefully that the commentary is not written to the file you specify, but instead to one called filename.12345, if for example the pid of the traced process is 12345. This is helpful when valgrinding a whole tree of processes at once, since it means that each process writes to its own logfile, rather than the result being jumbled up in one big logfile. If filename.12345 already exists, then it will name new files filename.12345.1 and so on. If you want to specify precisely the file name to use, without the trailing .12345part, you can instead use --log-file-exactly=filename. You can also use the --log-file-qualifier=<VAR> option to specify the filename via the environment variable $VAR. This is rarely needed, but very useful in certain circumstances (eg. when running MPI programs). The least intrusive option is to send the commentary to a network socket. The socket is specified as an IP address and port number pair, like this: --log-socket=192.168.0.1:12345 if you want to send the output to host IP 192.168.0.1 port 12345 (I have no idea if 12345 is a port of pre-existing significance). You can also omit the port number: --log-socket=192.168.0.1, in which case a default port of 1500 is used. This default is defined by the constant VG_CLO_DEFAULT_LOGPORT in the sources. Note, unfortunately, that you have to use an IP address here, rather than a hostname. Writing to a network socket is pretty useless if you don't have something listening at the other end. We provide a simple listener program, valgrind-listener, which accepts connections on the specified port and copies whatever it is sent to stdout. Probably someone will tell us this is a horrible security risk. It seems likely that people will write more sophisticated listeners in the fullness of time. valgrind-listener can accept simultaneous connections from up to 50 valgrinded processes. In front of each line of output it prints the current number of active connections in round brackets. valgrind-listener accepts two command-line flags: -e or --exit-at-zero: when the number of connected processes falls back to zero, exit. Without this, it will run forever, that is, until you send it Control-C. portnumber: changes the port it listens on from the default (1500). The specified port must be in the range 1024 to 65535. The same restriction applies to port numbers specified by a --log-socket= to Valgrind itself. If a valgrinded process fails to connect to a listener, for whatever reason (the listener isn't running, invalid or unreachable host or port, etc), Valgrind switches back to writing the commentary to stderr. The same goes for any process which loses an established connection to a listener. In other words, killing the listener doesn't kill the processes sending data to it. Here is an important point about the relationship between the commentary and profiling output from tools. The commentary contains a mix of messages from the Valgrind core and the selected tool. If the tool reports errors, it will report them to the commentary. However, if the tool does profiling, the profile data will be written to a file of some kind, depending on the tool, and independent of what --log-* options are in force. The commentary is intended to be a low-bandwidth, human-readable channel. Profiling data, on the other hand, is usually voluminous and not meaningful without further processing, which is why we have chosen this arrangement. When one of the error-checking tools (Memcheck, Addrcheck, Helgrind) detects something bad happening in the program, an error message is written to the commentary. For example: This message says that the program did an illegal 4-byte read of address 0xBFFFF74C, which, as far as Memcheck can tell, is not a valid stack address, nor corresponds to any currently malloc'd or free'd blocks. The read is happening at line 45 of bogon.cpp, called from line 66 of the same file, etc. For errors associated with an identified malloc'd/free'd block, for example reading free'd memory, Valgrind reports not only the location where the error happened, but also where the associated block was malloc'd/free'd. Valgrind remembers all error reports. When an error is detected, it is compared against old reports, to see if it is a duplicate. If so, the error is noted, but no further commentary is emitted. This avoids you being swamped with bazillions of duplicate error reports. If you want to know how many times each error occurred, run with the -v option. When execution finishes, all the reports are printed out, along with, and sorted by, their occurrence counts. This makes it easy to see which errors have occurred most frequently. Errors are reported before the associated operation actually happens. If you're using a tool (Memcheck, Addrcheck) which does address checking, and your program attempts to read from address zero, the tool will emit a message to this effect, and the program will then duly die with a segmentation fault. In general, you should try and fix errors in the order that they are reported. Not doing so can be confusing. For example, a program which copies uninitialised values to several memory locations, and later uses them, will generate several error messages, when run on Memcheck. The first such error message may well give the most direct clue to the root cause of the problem. The process of detecting duplicate errors is quite an expensive one and can become a significant performance overhead if your program generates huge quantities of errors. To avoid serious problems here, Valgrind will simply stop collecting errors after 1000 different errors have been seen, or 100000 errors in total have been seen. In this situation you might as well stop your program and fix it, because Valgrind won't tell you anything else useful after this. Note that the 1000/100000 limits apply after suppressed errors are removed. These limits are defined in m_errormgr.c and can be increased if necessary. To avoid this cutoff you can use the --error-limit=no flag. Then Valgrind will always show errors, regardless of how many there are. Use this flag carefully, since it may have a dire effect on performance. The error-checking tools detect numerous problems in the base libraries, such as the GNU C library, and the XFree86 client libraries, which come pre-installed on your GNU/Linux system. You can't easily fix these, but you don't want to see these errors (and yes, there are many!) So Valgrind reads a list of errors to suppress at startup. A default suppression file is cooked up by the ./configure script when the system is built. You can modify and add to the suppressions file at your leisure, or, better, write your own. Multiple suppression files are allowed. This is useful if part of your project contains errors you can't or don't want to fix, yet you don't want to continuously be reminded of them. By far the easiest way to add suppressions is to use the --gen-suppressions=yes flag described in . Each error to be suppressed is described very specifically, to minimise the possibility that a suppression-directive inadvertantly suppresses a bunch of similar errors which you did want to see. The suppression mechanism is designed to allow precise yet flexible specification of errors to suppress. If you use the -v flag, at the end of execution, Valgrind prints out one line for each used suppression, giving its name and the number of times it got used. Here's the suppressions used by a run of valgrind --tool=memcheck ls -l: Multiple suppressions files are allowed. By default, Valgrind uses $PREFIX/lib/valgrind/default.supp. You can ask to add suppressions from another file, by specifying --suppressions=/path/to/file.supp. If you want to understand more about suppressions, look at an existing suppressions file whilst reading the following documentation. The file glibc-2.2.supp, in the source distribution, provides some good examples. Each suppression has the following components: First line: its name. This merely gives a handy name to the suppression, by which it is referred to in the summary of used suppressions printed out when a program finishes. It's not important what the name is; any identifying string will do. Second line: name of the tool(s) that the suppression is for (if more than one, comma-separated), and the name of the suppression itself, separated by a colon (Nb: no spaces are allowed), eg: Recall that Valgrind-2.0.X is a modular system, in which different instrumentation tools can observe your program whilst it is running. Since different tools detect different kinds of errors, it is necessary to say which tool(s) the suppression is meaningful to. Tools will complain, at startup, if a tool does not understand any suppression directed to it. Tools ignore suppressions which are not directed to them. As a result, it is quite practical to put suppressions for all tools into the same suppression file. Valgrind's core can detect certain PThreads API errors, for which this line reads: Next line: a small number of suppression types have extra information after the second line (eg. the Param suppression for Memcheck) Remaining lines: This is the calling context for the error -- the chain of function calls that led to it. There can be up to four of these lines. Locations may be either names of shared objects/executables or wildcards matching function names. They begin obj: and fun: respectively. Function and object names to match against may use the wildcard characters * and ?. C++ function names must be mangled. If you are writing suppressions by hand, use the --demangle=no option to get the mangled names in your error messages. Finally, the entire suppression must be between curly braces. Each brace must be the first character on its own line. A suppression only suppresses an error when the error matches all the details in the suppression. Here's an example: What it means is: for Memcheck only, suppress a use-of-uninitialised-value error, when the data size is 4, when it occurs in the function __gconv_transform_ascii_internal, when that is called from any function of name matching __mbr*toc, when that is called from mbtowc. It doesn't apply under any other circumstances. The string by which this suppression is identified to the user is __gconv_transform_ascii_internal/__mbrtowc/mbtowc. (See for more details on the specifics of Memcheck's suppression kinds.) Another example, again for the Memcheck tool: Suppress any size 4 uninitialised-value error which occurs anywhere in libX11.so.6.2, when called from anywhere in the same library, when called from anywhere in libXaw.so.7.0. The inexact specification of locations is regrettable, but is about all you can hope for, given that the X11 libraries shipped with Red Hat 7.2 have had their symbol tables removed. Note: since the above two examples did not make it clear, you can freely mix the obj: and fun: styles of description within a single suppression record. As mentioned above, Valgrind's core accepts a common set of flags. The tools also accept tool-specific flags, which are documented seperately for each tool. You invoke Valgrind like this: tool_name [valgrind-options] your-prog [your-prog options]]]> Valgrind's default settings succeed in giving reasonable behaviour in most cases. We group the available options by rough categories. The single most important option. --tool=name Run the Valgrind tool called name, e.g. Memcheck, Addrcheck, Cachegrind, etc. These options work with all tools. --help Show help for all options, both for the core and for the selected tool. --help-debug Same as --help, but also lists debugging options which usually are only of use to Valgrind's developers. --version Show the version number of the Valgrind core. Tools can have their own version numbers. There is a scheme in place to ensure that tools only execute when the core version is one they are known to work with. This was done to minimise the chances of strange problems arising from tool-vs-core version incompatibilities. -q --quiet Run silently, and only print error messages. Useful if you are running regression tests or have some other automated test machinery. -v --verbose Be more verbose. Gives extra information on various aspects of your program, such as: the shared objects loaded, the suppressions used, the progress of the instrumentation and execution engines, and warnings about unusual behaviour. Repeating the flag increases the verbosity level. --trace-children=no [default] --trace-children=yes When enabled, Valgrind will trace into child processes. This is confusing and usually not what you want, so is disabled by default. --track-fds=no [default] --track-fds=yes When enabled, Valgrind will print out a list of open file descriptors on exit. Along with each file descriptor, Valgrind prints out a stack backtrace of where the file was opened and any details relating to the file descriptor such as the file name or socket details. --time-stamp=no [default] --time-stamp=yes When enabled, Valgrind will precede each message with an indication of the elapsed wallclock time since startup, expressed as days, hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. --log-fd=<number> [default: 2, stderr] Specifies that Valgrind should send all of its messages to the specified file descriptor. The default, 2, is the standard error channel (stderr). Note that this may interfere with the client's own use of stderr. --log-file=<filename> Specifies that Valgrind should send all of its messages to the specified file. In fact, the file name used is created by concatenating the text filename, "." and the process ID, so as to create a file per process. The specified file name may not be the empty string. --log-file-exactly=<filename> Just like --log-file, but the "." suffix is not added. If you trace multiple processes with Valgrind when using this option the log file may get all messed up. --log-file-qualifer=<VAR> Specifies that Valgrind should send all of its messages to the file named by the environment variable $VAR. This is useful when running MPI programs. --log-socket=<ip-address:port-number> Specifies that Valgrind should send all of its messages to the specified port at the specified IP address. The port may be omitted, in which case port 1500 is used. If a connection cannot be made to the specified socket, Valgrind falls back to writing output to the standard error (stderr). This option is intended to be used in conjunction with the valgrind-listener program. For further details, see . These options are used by all tools that can report errors, e.g. Memcheck, but not Cachegrind. --xml=no [default] --xml=yes When enabled, output will be in XML format. This is aimed at making life easier for tools that consume Valgrind's output as input, such as GUI front ends. Currently this option only works with Memcheck and Nulgrind. --xml-user-comment=<string> [default=""] Embeds an extra user comment string in the XML output. Only works with --xml=yes is specified; ignored otherwise. --demangle=no --demangle=yes [default] Disable/enable automatic demangling (decoding) of C++ names. Enabled by default. When enabled, Valgrind will attempt to translate encoded C++ procedure names back to something approaching the original. The demangler handles symbols mangled by g++ versions 2.X and 3.X. An important fact about demangling is that function names mentioned in suppressions files should be in their mangled form. Valgrind does not demangle function names when searching for applicable suppressions, because to do otherwise would make suppressions file contents dependent on the state of Valgrind's demangling machinery, and would also be slow and pointless. --num-callers=<number> [default=4] By default, Valgrind shows four levels of function call names to help you identify program locations. You can change that number with this option. This can help in determining the program's location in deeply-nested call chains. Note that errors are commoned up using only the top three function locations (the place in the current function, and that of its two immediate callers). So this doesn't affect the total number of errors reported. The maximum value for this is 50. Note that higher settings will make Valgrind run a bit more slowly and take a bit more memory, but can be useful when working with programs with deeply-nested call chains. --error-limit=yes [default] --error-limit=no When enabled, Valgrind stops reporting errors after 100000 in total, or 1000 different ones, have been seen. This is to stop the error tracking machinery from becoming a huge performance overhead in programs with many errors. --show-below-main=yes --show-below-main=no [default] By default, stack traces for errors do not show any functions that appear beneath main(); most of the time it's uninteresting C library stuff. If this option is enabled, these entries below main() will be shown. --suppressions=<filename> [default: $PREFIX/lib/valgrind/default.supp] Specifies an extra file from which to read descriptions of errors to suppress. You may use as many extra suppressions files as you like. --gen-suppressions=no [default] --gen-suppressions=yes --gen-suppressions=all When set to yes, Valgrind will pause after every error shown, and print the line: ---- Print suppression ? --- [Return/N/n/Y/y/C/c] ---- The prompt's behaviour is the same as for the --db-attach option. If you choose to, Valgrind will print out a suppression for this error. You can then cut and paste it into a suppression file if you don't want to hear about the error in the future. When set to all, Valgrind will print a suppression for every reported error, without querying the user. This option is particularly useful with C++ programs, as it prints out the suppressions with mangled names, as required. Note that the suppressions printed are as specific as possible. You may want to common up similar ones, eg. by adding wildcards to function names. Also, sometimes two different errors are suppressed by the same suppression, in which case Valgrind will output the suppression more than once, but you only need to have one copy in your suppression file (but having more than one won't cause problems). Also, the suppression name is given as <insert a suppression name here>; the name doesn't really matter, it's only used with the -v option which prints out all used suppression records. --db-attach=no [default] --db-attach=yes When enabled, Valgrind will pause after every error shown, and print the line: ---- Attach to debugger ? --- [Return/N/n/Y/y/C/c] ---- Pressing Ret, or N Ret or n Ret, causes Valgrind not to start a debugger for this error. Y Ret or y Ret causes Valgrind to start a debugger, for the program at this point. When you have finished with the debugger, quit from it, and the program will continue. Trying to continue from inside the debugger doesn't work. C Ret or c Ret causes Valgrind not to start a debugger, and not to ask again. --db-attach=yes conflicts with --trace-children=yes. You can't use them together. Valgrind refuses to start up in this situation. 1 May 2002: this is a historical relic which could be easily fixed if it gets in your way. Mail me and complain if this is a problem for you. Nov 2002: if you're sending output to a logfile or to a network socket, I guess this option doesn't make any sense. Caveat emptor. --db-command=<command> [default: gdb -nw %f %p] This specifies how Valgrind will invoke the debugger. By default it will use whatever GDB is detected at build time, which is usually /usr/bin/gdb. Using this command, you can specify some alternative command to invoke the debugger you want to use. The command string given can include one or instances of the %p and %f expansions. Each instance of %p expands to the PID of the process to be debugged and each instance of %f expands to the path to the executable for the process to be debugged. --input-fd=<number> [default=0, stdin] When using --db-attach=yes and --gen-suppressions=yes, Valgrind will stop so as to read keyboard input from you, when each error occurs. By default it reads from the standard input (stdin), which is problematic for programs which close stdin. This option allows you to specify an alternative file descriptor from which to read input. --max-stackframe=<number> [default=2000000] You may need to use this option if your program has large stack-allocated arrays. Valgrind keeps track of your program's stack pointer. If it changes by more than the threshold amount, Valgrind assumes your program is switching to a different stack, and Memcheck behaves differently than it would for a stack pointer change smaller than the threshold. Usually this heuristic works well. However, if your program allocates large structures on the stack, this heuristic will be fooled, and Memcheck will subsequently report large numbers of invalid stack accesses. This option allows you to change the threshold to a different value. You should only consider use of this flag if Valgrind's debug output directs you to do so. In that case it will tell you the new threshold you should specify. In general, allocating large structures on the stack is a bad idea, because (1) you can easily run out of stack space, especially on systems with limited memory or which expect to support large numbers of threads each with a small stack, and (2) because the error checking performed by Memcheck is more effective for heap-allocated data than for stack-allocated data. If you have to use this flag, you may wish to consider rewriting your code to allocate on the heap rather than on the stack. For tools that use their own version of malloc() (e.g. Memcheck and Addrcheck), the following options apply. --alignment=<number> [default: 8] By default Valgrind's malloc, realloc, etc, return 8-byte aligned addresses. This is standard for most processors. Some programs might however assume that malloc et al return 16- or more aligned memory. The supplied value must be between 4 and 4096 inclusive, and must be a power of two. These options apply to all tools, as they affect certain obscure workings of the Valgrind core. Most people won't need to use these. --run-libc-freeres=yes [default] --run-libc-freeres=no The GNU C library (libc.so), which is used by all programs, may allocate memory for its own uses. Usually it doesn't bother to free that memory when the program ends - there would be no point, since the Linux kernel reclaims all process resources when a process exits anyway, so it would just slow things down. The glibc authors realised that this behaviour causes leak checkers, such as Valgrind, to falsely report leaks in glibc, when a leak check is done at exit. In order to avoid this, they provided a routine called __libc_freeres specifically to make glibc release all memory it has allocated. Memcheck and Addrcheck therefore try and run __libc_freeres at exit. Unfortunately, in some versions of glibc, __libc_freeres is sufficiently buggy to cause segmentation faults. This is particularly noticeable on Red Hat 7.1. So this flag is provided in order to inhibit the run of __libc_freeres. If your program seems to run fine on Valgrind, but segfaults at exit, you may find that --run-libc-freeres=no fixes that, although at the cost of possibly falsely reporting space leaks in libc.so. --sim-hints=hint1,hint2,... Pass miscellaneous hints to Valgrind which slightly modify the simulated behaviour in nonstandard or dangerous ways, possibly to help the simulation of strange features. By default no hints are enabled. Use with caution! Currently known hints are: lax-ioctls Be very lax about ioctl handling; the only assumption is that the size is correct. Doesn't require the full buffer to be initialized when writing. Without this, using some device drivers with a large number of strange ioctl commands becomes very tiresome. enable-inner Enable some special magic needed when the program being run is itself Valgrind. --kernel-variant=variant1,variant2,... Handle system calls and ioctls arising from minor variants of the default kernel for this platform. This is useful for running on hacked kernels or with kernel modules which support nonstandard ioctls, for example. Use with caution. If you don't understand what this option does then you almost certainly don't need it. Currently known variants are: bproc Support the sys_broc system call on x86. This is for running on BProc, which is a minor variant of standard Linux which is sometimes used for building clusters. --show-emwarns=no [default] --show-emwarns=yes When enabled, Valgrind will emit warnings about its CPU emulation in certain cases. These are usually not interesting. --smc-check=none --smc-check=stack [default] --smc-check=all This option controls Valgrind's detection of self-modifying code. Valgrind can do no detection, detect self-modifying code on the stack, or detect self-modifying code anywhere. Note that the default option will catch the vast majority of cases, as far as we know. Running with all will slow Valgrind down greatly (but running with none will rarely speed things up, since very little code gets put on the stack for most programs). There are also some options for debugging Valgrind itself. You shouldn't need to use them in the normal run of things. If you wish to see the list, use the --help-debug option. Note that Valgrind also reads options from three places: The file ~/.valgrindrc The environment variable $VALGRIND_OPTS The file ./.valgrindrc These are processed in the given order, before the command-line options. Options processed later override those processed earlier; for example, options in ./.valgrindrc will take precedence over those in ~/.valgrindrc. The first two are particularly useful for setting the default tool to use. Any tool-specific options put in $VALGRIND_OPTS or the .valgrindrc files should be prefixed with the tool name and a colon. For example, if you want Memcheck to always do leak checking, you can put the following entry in ~/.valgrindrc: This will be ignored if any tool other than Memcheck is run. Without the memcheck: part, this will cause problems if you select other tools that don't understand --leak-check=yes. Valgrind has a trapdoor mechanism via which the client program can pass all manner of requests and queries to Valgrind and the current tool. Internally, this is used extensively to make malloc, free, signals, threads, etc, work, although you don't see that. For your convenience, a subset of these so-called client requests is provided to allow you to tell Valgrind facts about the behaviour of your program, and conversely to make queries. In particular, your program can tell Valgrind about changes in memory range permissions that Valgrind would not otherwise know about, and so allows clients to get Valgrind to do arbitrary custom checks. Clients need to include a header file to make this work. Which header file depends on which client requests you use. Some client requests are handled by the core, and are defined in the header file valgrind/valgrind.h. Tool-specific header files are named after the tool, e.g. valgrind/memcheck.h. All header files can be found in the include/valgrind directory of wherever Valgrind was installed. The macros in these header files have the magical property that they generate code in-line which Valgrind can spot. However, the code does nothing when not run on Valgrind, so you are not forced to run your program under Valgrind just because you use the macros in this file. Also, you are not required to link your program with any extra supporting libraries. The code left in your binary has negligible performance impact. However, if you really wish to compile out the client requests, you can compile with -DNVALGRIND (analogous to -DNDEBUG's effect on assert()). You are encouraged to copy the valgrind/*.h headers into your project's include directory, so your program doesn't have a compile-time dependency on Valgrind being installed. The Valgrind headers, unlike the rest of the code, is under a BSD-style license so you may include them without worrying about license incompatibility. Here is a brief description of the macros available in valgrind.h, which work with more than one tool (see the tool-specific documentation for explanations of the tool-specific macros). RUNNING_ON_VALGRIND: returns 1 if running on Valgrind, 0 if running on the real CPU. If you are running Valgrind under itself, it will return the number of layers of Valgrind emulation we're running under. VALGRIND_DISCARD_TRANSLATIONS: discard translations of code in the specified address range. Useful if you are debugging a JITter or some other dynamic code generation system. After this call, attempts to execute code in the invalidated address range will cause Valgrind to make new translations of that code, which is probably the semantics you want. Note that this is implemented naively, and involves checking all 200191 entries in the translation table to see if any of them overlap the specified address range. So try not to call it often, or performance will nosedive. Note that you can be clever about this: you only need to call it when an area which previously contained code is overwritten with new code. You can choose to write coode into fresh memory, and just call this occasionally to discard large chunks of old code all at once. Warning: minimally tested, especially for tools other than Memcheck. VALGRIND_COUNT_ERRORS: returns the number of errors found so far by Valgrind. Can be useful in test harness code when combined with the --log-fd=-1 option; this runs Valgrind silently, but the client program can detect when errors occur. Only useful for tools that report errors, e.g. it's useful for Memcheck, but for Cachegrind it will always return zero because Cachegrind doesn't report errors. VALGRIND_MALLOCLIKE_BLOCK: If your program manages its own memory instead of using the standard malloc() / new / new[], tools that track information about heap blocks will not do nearly as good a job. For example, Memcheck won't detect nearly as many errors, and the error messages won't be as informative. To improve this situation, use this macro just after your custom allocator allocates some new memory. See the comments in valgrind.h for information on how to use it. VALGRIND_FREELIKE_BLOCK: This should be used in conjunction with VALGRIND_MALLOCLIKE_BLOCK. Again, see memcheck/memcheck.h for information on how to use it. VALGRIND_CREATE_MEMPOOL: This is similar to VALGRIND_MALLOCLIKE_BLOCK, but is tailored towards code that uses memory pools. See the comments in valgrind.h for information on how to use it. VALGRIND_DESTROY_MEMPOOL: This should be used in conjunction with VALGRIND_CREATE_MEMPOOL Again, see the comments in valgrind.h for information on how to use it. VALGRIND_MEMPOOL_ALLOC: This should be used in conjunction with VALGRIND_CREATE_MEMPOOL Again, see the comments in valgrind.h for information on how to use it. VALGRIND_MEMPOOL_FREE: This should be used in conjunction with VALGRIND_CREATE_MEMPOOL Again, see the comments in valgrind.h for information on how to use it. VALGRIND_NON_SIMD_CALL[0123]: executes a function of 0, 1, 2 or 3 args in the client program on the real CPU, not the virtual CPU that Valgrind normally runs code on. These are used in various ways internally to Valgrind. They might be useful to client programs. Only use these if you really know what you are doing. VALGRIND_PRINTF(format, ...): printf a message to the log file when running under Valgrind. Nothing is output if not running under Valgrind. Returns the number of characters output. VALGRIND_PRINTF_BACKTRACE(format, ...): printf a message to the log file along with a stack backtrace when running under Valgrind. Nothing is output if not running under Valgrind. Returns the number of characters output. VALGRIND_STACK_REGISTER(start, end): Register a new stack. Informs Valgrind that the memory range between start and end is a unique stack. Returns a stack identifier that can be used with other VALGRIND_STACK_* calls. Valgrind will use this information to determine if a change to the stack pointer is an item pushed onto the stack or a change over to a new stack. Use this if you're using a user-level thread package and are noticing spurious errors from Valgrind about uninitialized memory reads. VALGRIND_STACK_DEREGISTER(id): Deregister a previously registered stack. Informs Valgrind that previously registered memory range with stack id id is no longer a stack. VALGRIND_STACK_CHANGE(id, start, end): Change a previously registered stack. Informs Valgrind that the previously registerer stack with stack id id has changed it's start and end values. Use this if your user-level thread package implements stack growth. Note that valgrind.h is included by all the tool-specific header files (such as memcheck.h), so you don't need to include it in your client if you include a tool-specific header. Valgrind supports programs which use POSIX pthreads. Getting this to work was technically challenging but it all works well enough for significant threaded applications to work. The main thing to point out is that although Valgrind works with the built-in threads system (eg. NPTL or LinuxThreads), it serialises execution so that only one thread is running at a time. This approach avoids the horrible implementation problems of implementing a truly multiprocessor version of Valgrind, but it does mean that threaded apps run only on one CPU, even if you have a multiprocessor machine. Valgrind schedules your program's threads in a round-robin fashion, with all threads having equal priority. It switches threads every 50000 basic blocks (on x86, typically around 300000 instructions), which means you'll get a much finer interleaving of thread executions than when run natively. This in itself may cause your program to behave differently if you have some kind of concurrency, critical race, locking, or similar, bugs. Valgrind has a fairly complete signal implementation. It should be able to cope with any valid use of signals. If you're using signals in clever ways (for example, catching SIGSEGV, modifying page state and restarting the instruction), you're probably relying on precise exceptions. In this case, you will need to use --single-step=yes. If your program dies as a result of a fatal core-dumping signal, Valgrind will generate its own core file (vgcore.pidNNNNN) containing your program's state. You may use this core file for post-mortem debugging with gdb or similar. (Note: it will not generate a core if your core dump size limit is 0.) We use the standard Unix ./configure, make, make install mechanism, and we have attempted to ensure that it works on machines with kernel 2.4 or 2.6 and glibc 2.2.X, 2.3.X, 2.4.X. There are two options (in addition to the usual --prefix= which affect how Valgrind is built: --enable-pie PIE stands for "position-independent executable". PIE allows Valgrind to place itself as high as possible in memory, giving your program as much address space as possible. It also allows Valgrind to run under itself. If PIE is disabled, Valgrind loads at a default address which is suitable for most systems. This is also useful for debugging Valgrind itself. It's not on by default because it caused problems for some people. Note that not all toolchaines support PIEs, you need fairly recent version of the compiler, linker, etc. --enable-tls TLS (Thread Local Storage) is a relatively new mechanism which requires compiler, linker and kernel support. Valgrind automatically test if TLS is supported and enable this option. Sometimes it cannot test for TLS, so this option allows you to override the automatic test. The configure script tests the version of the X server currently indicated by the current $DISPLAY. This is a known bug. The intention was to detect the version of the current XFree86 client libraries, so that correct suppressions could be selected for them, but instead the test checks the server version. This is just plain wrong. If you are building a binary package of Valgrind for distribution, please read README_PACKAGERS . It contains some important information. Apart from that, there's not much excitement here. Let us know if you have build problems. Contact us at http://www.valgrind.org. See for the known limitations of Valgrind, and for a list of programs which are known not to work on it. The translator/instrumentor has a lot of assertions in it. They are permanently enabled, and I have no plans to disable them. If one of these breaks, please mail us! If you get an assertion failure on the expression blockSane(ch) in VG_(free)() in m_mallocfree.c, this may have happened because your program wrote off the end of a malloc'd block, or before its beginning. Valgrind hopefully will have emitted a proper message to that effect before dying in this way. This is a known problem which we should fix. Read the FAQ for more advice about common problems, crashes, etc. The following list of limitations seems depressingly long. However, most programs actually work fine. Valgrind will run x86/Linux ELF dynamically linked binaries, on a kernel 2.4.X or 2.6.X system, subject to the following constraints: On x86 and AMD64, there is no support for 3DNow! instructions. If the translator encounters these, Valgrind will generate a SIGILL when the instruction is executed. The same is true for Intel's SSE3 SIMD instructions. Atomic instruction sequences are not supported, which will affect any use of synchronization objects being shared between processes. They will appear to work, but fail sporadically. If your program does its own memory management, rather than using malloc/new/free/delete, it should still work, but Valgrind's error checking won't be so effective. If you describe your program's memory management scheme using "client requests" (Section 3.7 of this manual), Memcheck can do better. Nevertheless, using malloc/new and free/delete is still the best approach. Valgrind's signal simulation is not as robust as it could be. Basic POSIX-compliant sigaction and sigprocmask functionality is supplied, but it's conceivable that things could go badly awry if you do weird things with signals. Workaround: don't. Programs that do non-POSIX signal tricks are in any case inherently unportable, so should be avoided if possible. Machine instructions, and system calls, have been implemented on demand. So it's possible, although unlikely, that a program will fall over with a message to that effect. If this happens, please report ALL the details printed out, so we can try and implement the missing feature. Memory consumption of your program is majorly increased whilst running under Valgrind. This is due to the large amount of administrative information maintained behind the scenes. Another cause is that Valgrind dynamically translates the original executable. Translated, instrumented code is 14-16 times larger than the original (!) so you can easily end up with 30+ MB of translations when running (eg) a web browser. Valgrind can handle dynamically-generated code just fine. If you regenerate code over the top of old code (ie. at the same memory addresses), if the code is on the stack Valgrind will realise the code has changed, and work correctly. This is necessary to handle the trampolines GCC uses to implemented nested functions. If you regenerate code somewhere other than the stack, you will need to use the --smc-check=all flag, and Valgrind will run more slowly than normal. As of version 3.0.0, Valgrind has the following limitations in its implementation of floating point relative to the IEEE754 standard. Precision: There is no support for 80 bit arithmetic. Internally, Valgrind represents all FP numbers in 64 bits, and so there may be some differences in results. Whether or not this is critical remains to be seen. Note, the x86/amd64 fldt/fstpt instructions (read/write 80-bit numbers) are correctly simulated, using conversions to/from 64 bits, so that in-memory images of 80-bit numbers look correct if anyone wants to see. The impression observed from many FP regression tests is that the accuracy differences aren't significant. Generally speaking, if a program relies on 80-bit precision, there may be difficulties porting it to non x86/amd64 platforms which only support 64-bit FP precision. Even on x86/amd64, the program may get different results depending on whether it is compiled to use SSE2 instructions (64-bits only), or x87 instructions (80-bit). The net effect is to make FP programs behave as if they had been run on a machine with 64-bit IEEE floats, for example PowerPC. On amd64 FP arithmetic is done by default on SSE2, so amd64 looks more like PowerPC than x86 from an FP perspective, and there are far fewer noticable accuracy differences than with x86. Rounding: Valgrind does observe the 4 IEEE-mandated rounding modes (to nearest, to +infinity, to -infinity, to zero) for the following conversions: float to integer, integer to float where there is a possibility of loss of precision, and float-to-float rounding. For all other FP operations, only the IEEE default mode (round to nearest) is supported. Numeric exceptions in FP code: IEEE754 defines five types of numeric exception that can happen: invalid operation (sqrt of negative number, etc), division by zero, overflow, underflow, inexact (loss of precision). For each exception, two courses of action are defined by 754: either (1) a user-defined exception handler may be called, or (2) a default action is defined, which "fixes things up" and allows the computation to proceed without throwing an exception. Currently Valgrind only supports the default fixup actions. Again, feedback on the importance of exception support would be appreciated. When Valgrind detects that the program is trying to exceed any of these limitations (setting exception handlers, rounding mode, or precision control), it can print a message giving a traceback of where this has happened, and continue execution. This behaviour used to be the default, but the messages are annoying and so showing them is now optional. Use --show-emwarns=yes to see them. The above limitations define precisely the IEEE754 'default' behaviour: default fixup on all exceptions, round-to-nearest operations, and 64-bit precision. As of version 3.0.0, Valgrind has the following limitations in its implementation of x86/AMD64 SSE2 FP arithmetic. Essentially the same: no exceptions, and limited observance of rounding mode. Also, SSE2 has control bits which make it treat denormalised numbers as zero (DAZ) and a related action, flush denormals to zero (FTZ). Both of these cause SSE2 arithmetic to be less accurate than IEEE requires. Valgrind detects, ignores, and can warn about, attempts to enable either mode. Programs which are known not to work are: emacs starts up but immediately concludes it is out of memory and aborts. Emacs has it's own memory-management scheme, but I don't understand why this should interact so badly with Valgrind. Emacs works fine if you build it to use the standard malloc/free routines. Known platform-specific limitations, as of release 2.4.0: (none) Some gory details, for those with a passion for gory details. You don't need to read this section if all you want to do is use Valgrind. What follows is an outline of the machinery. It is out of date, as the JITter has been completey rewritten in version 3.0, and so it works quite differently. A more detailed (and even more out of date) description is to be found . Valgrind is compiled into two executables: valgrind, and stage2. valgrind is a statically-linked executable which loads at the normal address (0x8048000). stage2 is a normal dynamically-linked executable; it is either linked to load at a high address (0xb8000000) or is a Position Independent Executable. Valgrind (also known as stage1): Decides where to load stage2. Pads the address space with mmap, leaving holes only where stage2 should load. Loads stage2 in the same manner as execve() would, but "manually". Jumps to the start of stage2. Once stage2 is loaded, it uses dlopen() to load the tool, unmaps all traces of stage1, initializes the client's state, and starts the synthetic CPU. Each thread runs in its own kernel thread, and loops in VG_(schedule) as it runs. When the thread terminates, VG_(schedule) returns. Once all the threads have terminated, Valgrind as a whole exits. Each thread also has two stacks. One is the client's stack, which is manipulated with the client's instructions. The other is Valgrind's internal stack, which is used by all Valgrind's code on behalf of that thread. It is important to not get them confused. Valgrind does not directly run any of the original program's code. Only instrumented translations are run. Valgrind maintains a translation table, which allows it to find the translation quickly for any branch target (code address). If no translation has yet been made, the translator - a just-in-time translator - is summoned. This makes an instrumented translation, which is added to the collection of translations. Subsequent jumps to that address will use this translation. Valgrind no longer directly supports detection of self-modifying code. Such checking is expensive, and in practice (fortunately) almost no applications need it. However, to help people who are debugging dynamic code generation systems, there is a Client Request (basically a macro you can put in your program) which directs Valgrind to discard translations in a given address range. So Valgrind can still work in this situation provided the client tells it when code has become out-of-date and needs to be retranslated. The JITter translates basic blocks -- blocks of straight-line-code -- as single entities. To minimise the considerable difficulties of dealing with the x86 instruction set, x86 instructions are first translated to a RISC-like intermediate code, similar to sparc code, but with an infinite number of virtual integer registers. Initially each insn is translated seperately, and there is no attempt at instrumentation. The intermediate code is improved, mostly so as to try and cache the simulated machine's registers in the real machine's registers over several simulated instructions. This is often very effective. Also, we try to remove redundant updates of the simulated machines's condition-code register. The intermediate code is then instrumented, giving more intermediate code. There are a few extra intermediate-code operations to support instrumentation; it is all refreshingly simple. After instrumentation there is a cleanup pass to remove redundant value checks. This gives instrumented intermediate code which mentions arbitrary numbers of virtual registers. A linear-scan register allocator is used to assign real registers and possibly generate spill code. All of this is still phrased in terms of the intermediate code. This machinery is inspired by the work of Reuben Thomas (Mite). Then, and only then, is the final x86 code emitted. The intermediate code is carefully designed so that x86 code can be generated from it without need for spare registers or other inconveniences. The translations are managed using a traditional LRU-based caching scheme. The translation cache has a default size of about 14MB. Each byte in the process' address space has nine bits associated with it: one A bit and eight V bits. The A and V bits for each byte are stored using a sparse array, which flexibly and efficiently covers arbitrary parts of the 32-bit address space without imposing significant space or performance overheads for the parts of the address space never visited. The scheme used, and speedup hacks, are described in detail at the top of the source file coregrind/vg_memory.c, so you should read that for the gory details. All system calls are intercepted. The memory status map is consulted before and updated after each call. It's all rather tiresome. See coregrind/vg_syscalls.c for details. All signal-related system calls are intercepted. If the client program is trying to set a signal handler, Valgrind makes a note of the handler address and which signal it is for. Valgrind then arranges for the same signal to be delivered to its own handler. When such a signal arrives, Valgrind's own handler catches it, and notes the fact. At a convenient safe point in execution, Valgrind builds a signal delivery frame on the client's stack and runs its handler. If the handler longjmp()s, there is nothing more to be said. If the handler returns, Valgrind notices this, zaps the delivery frame, and carries on where it left off before delivering the signal. The purpose of this nonsense is that setting signal handlers essentially amounts to giving callback addresses to the Linux kernel. We can't allow this to happen, because if it did, signal handlers would run on the real CPU, not the simulated one. This means the checking machinery would not operate during the handler run, and, worse, memory permissions maps would not be updated, which could cause spurious error reports once the handler had returned. An even worse thing would happen if the signal handler longjmp'd rather than returned: Valgrind would completely lose control of the client program. Upshot: we can't allow the client to install signal handlers directly. Instead, Valgrind must catch, on behalf of the client, any signal the client asks to catch, and must delivery it to the client on the simulated CPU, not the real one. This involves considerable gruesome fakery; see coregrind/vg_signals.c for details. This is the log for a run of a small program using Memcheck The program is in fact correct, and the reported error is as the result of a potentially serious code generation bug in GNU g++ (snapshot 20010527). The GCC folks fixed this about a week before gcc-3.0 shipped. Most of these only appear if you run in verbose mode (enabled by -v): More than 50 errors detected. Subsequent errors will still be recorded, but in less detail than before. After 50 different errors have been shown, Valgrind becomes more conservative about collecting them. It then requires only the program counters in the top two stack frames to match when deciding whether or not two errors are really the same one. Prior to this point, the PCs in the top four frames are required to match. This hack has the effect of slowing down the appearance of new errors after the first 50. The 50 constant can be changed by recompiling Valgrind. More than 300 errors detected. I'm not reporting any more. Final error counts may be inaccurate. Go fix your program! After 300 different errors have been detected, Valgrind ignores any more. It seems unlikely that collecting even more different ones would be of practical help to anybody, and it avoids the danger that Valgrind spends more and more of its time comparing new errors against an ever-growing collection. As above, the 300 number is a compile-time constant. Warning: client switching stacks? Valgrind spotted such a large change in the stack pointer, %esp, that it guesses the client is switching to a different stack. At this point it makes a kludgey guess where the base of the new stack is, and sets memory permissions accordingly. You may get many bogus error messages following this, if Valgrind guesses wrong. At the moment "large change" is defined as a change of more that 2000000 in the value of the %esp (stack pointer) register. Warning: client attempted to close Valgrind's logfile fd <number> Valgrind doesn't allow the client to close the logfile, because you'd never see any diagnostic information after that point. If you see this message, you may want to use the --log-fd=<number> option to specify a different logfile file-descriptor number. Warning: noted but unhandled ioctl <number> Valgrind observed a call to one of the vast family of ioctl system calls, but did not modify its memory status info (because I have not yet got round to it). The call will still have gone through, but you may get spurious errors after this as a result of the non-update of the memory info. Warning: set address range perms: large range <number> Diagnostic message, mostly for benefit of the valgrind developers, to do with memory permissions.