
Release notes for Valgrind
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you are building a binary package of Valgrind for distribution,
please read README_PACKAGERS.  It contains some important information.

If you are developing Valgrind, please read README_DEVELOPERS.  It contains
some useful information.

For instructions on how to build/install, see the end of this file.

If you have problems, consult the FAQ to see if there are workarounds.


Executive Summary
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Valgrind is an award-winning instrumentation framework for building
dynamic analysis tools. There are Valgrind tools that can automatically
detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your
programs in detail. You can also use Valgrind to build new tools.

The Valgrind distribution currently includes six production-quality
tools: a memory error detector, two thread error detectors, a cache and
branch-prediction profiler, a call-graph generating cache profiler, and
a heap profiler. It also includes two experimental tools:  a
heap/stack/global array overrun detector, and a SimPoint basic block vector
generator.

Valgrind is closely tied to details of the CPU, operating system and to
a lesser extent, compiler and basic C libraries. This makes it difficult
to make it portable.  Nonetheless, it is available for the following
platforms: 

- x86/Linux
- AMD64/Linux
- PPC32/Linux
- PPC64/Linux
- x86/MacOSX
- AMD64/MacOSX

Note that AMD64 is just another name for x86-64, and Valgrind runs fine
on Intel processors.  Also note that the core of MacOSX is called
"Darwin" and this name is used sometimes.

Valgrind is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2. 
Read the file COPYING in the source distribution for details.


Documentation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A comprehensive user guide is supplied.  Point your browser at
$PREFIX/share/doc/valgrind/manual.html, where $PREFIX is whatever you
specified with --prefix= when building.


Building and installing it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To install from the Subversion repository :

  0. Check out the code from SVN, following the instructions at
     http://www.valgrind.org/downloads/repository.html.

  1. cd into the source directory.

  2. Run ./autogen.sh to setup the environment (you need the standard
     autoconf tools to do so).

  3. Continue with the following instructions...

To install from a tar.bz2 distribution:

  4. Run ./configure, with some options if you wish.  The only interesting
     one is the usual --prefix=/where/you/want/it/installed.

  5. Run "make".

  6. Run "make install", possibly as root if the destination permissions
     require that.

  7. See if it works.  Try "valgrind ls -l".  Either this works, or it
     bombs out with some complaint.  In that case, please let us know
     (see www.valgrind.org).

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.


The Valgrind Developers