blob: c5301b93ce2a9786bc8b9ac3949b9bc29014a570 [file] [log] [blame]
1 July 2002
Greetings, packaging person! This information is aimed at people
building binary distributions of Valgrind.
Thanks for taking the time and effort to make a binary distribution
of Valgrind. The following notes may save you some trouble.
-- (Unfortunate but true) When you configure to build with the
--prefix=/foo/bar/xyzzy option, the prefix /foo/bar/xyzzy gets
baked into valgrind.so. The consequence is that you _must_ install
valgrind at the location specified in the prefix. If you don't,
it may appear to work, but will break doing some obscure things,
particularly doing fork() and exec().
So you can't build a relocatable RPM / whatever from Valgrind.
-- Don't strip the debug info off valgrind.so or libpthread.so.
Valgrind will still work if you do, but it will generate less
helpful error messages. Here's an example:
Mismatched free() / delete / delete []
at 0x40043249: free (vg_clientfuncs.c:171)
by 0x4102BB4E: QGArray::~QGArray(void) (tools/qgarray.cpp:149)
by 0x4C261C41: PptDoc::~PptDoc(void) (include/qmemarray.h:60)
by 0x4C261F0E: PptXml::~PptXml(void) (pptxml.cc:44)
Address 0x4BB292A8 is 0 bytes inside a block of size 64 alloc'd
at 0x4004318C: __builtin_vec_new (vg_clientfuncs.c:152)
by 0x4C21BC15: KLaola::readSBStream(int) const (klaola.cc:314)
by 0x4C21C155: KLaola::stream(KLaola::OLENode const *) (klaola.cc:416)
by 0x4C21788F: OLEFilter::convert(QCString const &) (olefilter.cc:272)
This tells you that some memory allocated with new[] was freed with
free(). If valgrind.so was stripped the message would look like
this:
Mismatched free() / delete / delete []
at 0x40043249: (inside valgrind.so)
by 0x4102BB4E: QGArray::~QGArray(void) (tools/qgarray.cpp:149)
by 0x4C261C41: PptDoc::~PptDoc(void) (include/qmemarray.h:60)
by 0x4C261F0E: PptXml::~PptXml(void) (pptxml.cc:44)
Address 0x4BB292A8 is 0 bytes inside a block of size 64 alloc'd
at 0x4004318C: (inside valgrind.so)
by 0x4C21BC15: KLaola::readSBStream(int) const (klaola.cc:314)
by 0x4C21C155: KLaola::stream(KLaola::OLENode const *) (klaola.cc:416)
by 0x4C21788F: OLEFilter::convert(QCString const &) (olefilter.cc:272)
This isn't so helpful. Although you can tell there is a mismatch,
the names of the allocating and deallocating functions are no longer
visible. The same kind of thing occurs in various other messages
from valgrind.
-- Try and ensure that the /usr/include/asm/unistd.h file on the
build machine contains an entry for all the system calls that
the kernels on the target machines can actually support. On my
Red Hat 7.2 (kernel 2.4.9) box the highest-numbered entry is
#define __NR_fcntl64 221
but I have heard of 2.2 boxes where it stops at 179 or so.
Reason for this is that at build time, support for syscalls
is compiled in -- or not -- depending on which of these __NR_*
symbols is defined. Problems arise when /usr/include/asm/unistd.h
fails to give an entry for a system call which is actually
available in the target kernel. In that case, valgrind will
abort if asked to handle such a syscall. This is despite the
fact that (usually) valgrind's sources actually contain the
code to deal with the syscall.
Several people have reported having this problem. So, please
be aware of it. If it's useful, the syscall wrappers are
all done in vg_syscall_mem.c; you might want to have a little
look in there.
-- Please test the final installation works by running it on
something huge. I suggest checking that it can start and
exit successfully both Mozilla-1.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.0.
I use these as test programs, and I know they fairly thoroughly
exercise Valgrind. The command lines to use are:
valgrind -v --trace-children=yes --workaround-gcc296-bugs=yes mozilla
valgrind -v --trace-children=yes --workaround-gcc296-bugs=yes soffice
If you find any more hints/tips for packaging, please let me know
(jseward@acm.org). Thanks.