| |
| Release notes for Valgrind, version 1.0 |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| |
| KDE3 developers: please read also README_KDE3_FOLKS for guidance |
| about how to debug KDE3 applications with Valgrind. |
| |
| For instructions on how to build/install, see the end of this file. |
| |
| |
| Executive Summary |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| Valgrind is a tool to help you find memory-management problems in your |
| programs. When a program is run under Valgrind's supervision, all |
| reads and writes of memory are checked, and calls to |
| malloc/new/free/delete are intercepted. As a result, Valgrind can |
| detect problems such as: |
| |
| Use of uninitialised memory |
| Reading/writing memory after it has been free'd |
| Reading/writing off the end of malloc'd blocks |
| Reading/writing inappropriate areas on the stack |
| Memory leaks -- where pointers to malloc'd blocks are lost forever |
| Passing of uninitialised and/or unaddressible memory to system calls |
| Mismatched use of malloc/new/new [] vs free/delete/delete [] |
| Some abuses of the POSIX pthread API |
| |
| Problems like these can be difficult to find by other means, often |
| lying undetected for long periods, then causing occasional, |
| difficult-to-diagnose crashes. |
| |
| When Valgrind detects such a problem, it can, if you like, attach GDB |
| to your program, so you can poke around and see what's going on. |
| |
| Valgrind is closely tied to details of the CPU, operating system and |
| to a less extent, compiler and basic C libraries. This makes it |
| difficult to make it portable, so I have chosen at the outset to |
| concentrate on what I believe to be a widely used platform: Red Hat |
| Linux 7.2, on x86s. I believe that it will work without significant |
| difficulty on other x86 GNU/Linux systems which use the 2.4 kernel and |
| GNU libc 2.2.X, for example SuSE 7.1 and Mandrake 8.0. Red Hat 6.2 is |
| also supported. It has worked in the past, and probably still does, |
| on RedHat 7.1 and 6.2. Note that I haven't compiled it on RedHat 7.1 |
| and 6.2 for a while, so they may no longer work now. |
| |
| Valgrind is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2. |
| Read the file LICENSE in the source distribution for details. |
| |
| |
| Documentation |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| A comprehensive user guide is supplied. Point your browser at |
| docs/index.html. If your browser doesn't like frames, point it |
| instead at docs/manual.html. There's also detailed, although somewhat |
| out of date, documentation of how valgrind works, in |
| docs/techdocs.html. |
| |
| |
| Building and installing it |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| If you install from CVS : |
| |
| 0. cd into the source directory |
| |
| 1. Run ./autogen.sh to setup the environment (you need the standard |
| autoconf tools to do so) |
| |
| If you install from a tar.gz archive: |
| |
| 2. Run ./configure, with some options if you wish. The standard |
| options are documented in the INSTALL file. The only interesting |
| one is the usual --prefix=/where/you/want/it/installed |
| |
| 3. Do "make" |
| |
| 4. Do "make install", possibly as root if the destination permissions |
| require that. |
| |
| 5. See if it works. Try "valgrind ls -l". Either this works, |
| or it bombs out complaining it can't find argc/argv/envp. |
| In that case, mail me a bug report. |
| |
| Important! Do not move the valgrind installation into a place |
| different from that specified by --prefix at build time. This will |
| cause things to break in subtle ways, mostly when Valgrind handles |
| fork/exec calls. |
| |
| |
| Julian Seward (jseward@acm.org) |
| 19 June 2002 |