NEWS

Version 1.9.6 (7 May 2003 or thereabouts)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Major changes in 1.9.6:

- Improved threading support for glibc >= 2.3.2 (SuSE 8.2,
  RedHat 9, to name but two ...)  It turned out that 1.9.5
  had problems with threading support on glibc >= 2.3.2,
  usually manifested by threaded programs deadlocking in system calls,
  or running unbelievably slowly.  Hopefully these are fixed now.  1.9.6
  is the first valgrind which gives reasonable support for
  glibc-2.3.2.  Also fixed a 2.3.2 problem with pthread_atfork().

- Majorly expanded FAQ.txt.  We've added workarounds for all
  common problems for which a workaround is known.

Minor changes in 1.9.6:

- Fix identification of the main thread's stack.  Incorrect
  identification of it was causing some on-stack addresses to not get
  identified as such.  This only affected the usefulness of some error
  messages; the correctness of the checks made is unchanged.

- Support for kernels >= 2.5.68.

- Dummy implementations of __libc_current_sigrtmin, 
  __libc_current_sigrtmax and __libc_allocate_rtsig, hopefully
  good enough to keep alive programs which previously died for lack of
  them.

- Fix bug in the VALGRIND_DISCARD_TRANSLATIONS client request.

- Debug info reading: read symbols from both "symtab" and "dynsym"
  sections, rather than merely from the one that comes last in the
  file.

- New syscall support: prctl(), creat(), lookup_dcookie().

- When checking calls to accept(), recvfrom(), getsocketopt(),
  don't complain if buffer values are NULL.

- Try and avoid assertion failures in
  mash_LD_PRELOAD_and_LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

- Minor bug fixes in cg_annotate.



Version 1.9.5 (7 April 2003)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It occurs to me that it would be helpful for valgrind users to record
in the source distribution the changes in each release.  So I now
attempt to mend my errant ways :-)  Changes in this and future releases
will be documented in the NEWS file in the source distribution.

Major changes in 1.9.5:

- (Critical bug fix): Fix a bug in the FPU simulation.  This was
  causing some floating point conditional tests not to work right.
  Several people reported this.  If you had floating point code which
  didn't work right on 1.9.1 to 1.9.4, it's worth trying 1.9.5.

- Partial support for Red Hat 9.  RH9 uses the new Native Posix 
  Threads Library (NPTL), instead of the older LinuxThreads.  
  This potentially causes problems with V which will take some
  time to correct.  In the meantime we have partially worked around
  this, and so 1.9.5 works on RH9.  Threaded programs still work,
  but they may deadlock, because some system calls (accept, read,
  write, etc) which should be nonblocking, in fact do block.  This
  is a known bug which we are looking into.

  If you can, your best bet (unfortunately) is to avoid using 
  1.9.5 on a Red Hat 9 system, or on any NPTL-based distribution.
  If your glibc is 2.3.1 or earlier, you're almost certainly OK.

Minor changes in 1.9.5:

- Added some #errors to valgrind.h to ensure people don't include
  it accidentally in their sources.  This is a change from 1.0.X
  which was never properly documented.  The right thing to include
  is now memcheck.h.  Some people reported problems and strange
  behaviour when (incorrectly) including valgrind.h in code with 
  1.9.1 -- 1.9.4.  This is no longer possible.

- Add some __extension__ bits and pieces so that gcc configured
  for valgrind-checking compiles even with -Werror.  If you
  don't understand this, ignore it.  Of interest to gcc developers
  only.

- Removed a pointless check which caused problems interworking 
  with Clearcase.  V would complain about shared objects whose
  names did not end ".so", and refuse to run.  This is now fixed.
  In fact it was fixed in 1.9.4 but not documented.

- Fixed a bug causing an assertion failure of "waiters == 1"
  somewhere in vg_scheduler.c, when running large threaded apps,
  notably MySQL.

- Add support for the munlock system call (124).

Some comments about future releases:

1.9.5 is, we hope, the most stable Valgrind so far.  It pretty much
supersedes the 1.0.X branch.  If you are a valgrind packager, please
consider making 1.9.5 available to your users.  You can regard the
1.0.X branch as obsolete: 1.9.5 is stable and vastly superior.  There
are no plans at all for further releases of the 1.0.X branch.

If you want a leading-edge valgrind, consider building the cvs head
(from SourceForge), or getting a snapshot of it.  Current cool stuff
going in includes MMX support (done); SSE/SSE2 support (in progress),
a significant (10-20%) performance improvement (done), and the usual
large collection of minor changes.  Hopefully we will be able to
improve our NPTL support, but no promises.