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<chapter id="new-tech-docs"
         xreflabel="The design and implementation of Valgrind">

<title>The Design and Implementation of Valgrind</title>


<para>A number of academic publications nicely describe many aspects
of Valgrind's design and implementation.  Online copies of all of
them, and others, are available at
http://valgrind.org/docs/pubs.html.</para>

<para>A good top-level overview of Valgrind is given in:</para>

<para>
"Valgrind: A Framework for Heavyweight Dynamic Binary
Instrumentation."  Nicholas Nethercote and Julian Seward.  Proceedings
of ACM SIGPLAN 2007 Conference on Programming Language Design and
Implementation (PLDI 2007), San Diego, California, USA, June 2007.
This paper describes how Valgrind works, and how it differs from other
DBI frameworks such as Pin and DynamoRIO.</para>


<para>The following two papers together give a comprehensive
description of how Memcheck works:</para>

<para>"Using Valgrind to detect undefined value errors with
bit-precision."  Julian Seward and Nicholas Nethercote.  Proceedings
of the USENIX'05 Annual Technical Conference, Anaheim, California,
USA, April 2005.  This paper describes in detail how Memcheck's
undefined value error detection (a.k.a. V bits) works.</para>

<para>"How to Shadow Every Byte of Memory Used by a Program."
Nicholas Nethercote and Julian Seward.  Proceedings of the Third
International ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS Conference on Virtual Execution
Environments (VEE 2007), San Diego, California, USA, June 2007.  This
paper describes in detail how Memcheck's shadow memory is implemented,
and compares it to other alternative approaches.</para>


<para>The following paper describes Callgrind:</para>

<para>"A Tool Suite for Simulation Based Analysis of Memory Access
Behavior."  Josef Weidendorfer, Markus Kowarschik and Carsten
Trinitis.  Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on
Computational Science (ICCS 2004), Krakow, Poland, June 2004.  This
paper describes Callgrind.</para>

<para>The following dissertation describes Valgrind in some detail
(some of these details are now out-of-date) as well as Cachegrind,
Annelid and Redux.  It also covers some underlying theory about
dynamic binary analysis in general and what all these tools have in
common:</para>

<para>"Dynamic Binary Analysis and Instrumentation."  Nicholas
Nethercote.  PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, November
2004.</para>


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