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sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +00001
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +00002These notes were significantly updated on 6 Dec 2007 for the Valgrind
33.3.0 release.
4
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +00005Greetings, packaging person! This information is aimed at people
6building binary distributions of Valgrind.
7
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +00008Thanks for taking the time and effort to make a binary distribution of
9Valgrind. The following notes may save you some trouble.
10
11
12-- Do not ship your Linux distro with a completely stripped
13 /lib/ld.so. At least leave the debugging symbol names on -- line
14 number info isn't necessary. If you don't want to leave symbols on
15 ld.so, alternatively you can have your distro install ld.so's
16 debuginfo package by default, or make ld.so.debuginfo be a
17 requirement of your Valgrind RPM/DEB/whatever.
18
19 Reason for this is that Valgrind's Memcheck tool needs to intercept
20 calls to, and provide replacements for, some symbols in ld.so at
21 startup (most importantly strlen). If it cannot do that, Memcheck
22 shows a large number of false positives due to the highly optimised
23 strlen (etc) routines in ld.so. This has caused some trouble in
24 the past. As of version 3.3.0, on some targets (ppc32-linux,
25 ppc64-linux), Memcheck will simply stop at startup (and print an
26 error message) if such symbols are not present, because it is
27 infeasible to continue.
28
29 It's not like this is going to cost you much space. We only need
30 the symbols for ld.so (a few K at most). Not the debug info and
31 not any debuginfo or extra symbols for any other libraries.
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000032
33
34-- (Unfortunate but true) When you configure to build with the
35 --prefix=/foo/bar/xyzzy option, the prefix /foo/bar/xyzzy gets
nethercote6bd3ebd2004-08-24 13:56:54 +000036 baked into valgrind. The consequence is that you _must_ install
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000037 valgrind at the location specified in the prefix. If you don't,
38 it may appear to work, but will break doing some obscure things,
39 particularly doing fork() and exec().
40
41 So you can't build a relocatable RPM / whatever from Valgrind.
42
43
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +000044-- Don't strip the debug info off lib/valgrind/$platform/vgpreload*.so
45 in the installation tree. Either Valgrind won't work at all, or it
46 will still work if you do, but will generate less helpful error
47 messages. Here's an example:
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000048
49 Mismatched free() / delete / delete []
50 at 0x40043249: free (vg_clientfuncs.c:171)
51 by 0x4102BB4E: QGArray::~QGArray(void) (tools/qgarray.cpp:149)
52 by 0x4C261C41: PptDoc::~PptDoc(void) (include/qmemarray.h:60)
53 by 0x4C261F0E: PptXml::~PptXml(void) (pptxml.cc:44)
54 Address 0x4BB292A8 is 0 bytes inside a block of size 64 alloc'd
55 at 0x4004318C: __builtin_vec_new (vg_clientfuncs.c:152)
56 by 0x4C21BC15: KLaola::readSBStream(int) const (klaola.cc:314)
57 by 0x4C21C155: KLaola::stream(KLaola::OLENode const *) (klaola.cc:416)
58 by 0x4C21788F: OLEFilter::convert(QCString const &) (olefilter.cc:272)
59
60 This tells you that some memory allocated with new[] was freed with
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +000061 free().
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000062
63 Mismatched free() / delete / delete []
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +000064 at 0x40043249: (inside vgpreload_memcheck.so)
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000065 by 0x4102BB4E: QGArray::~QGArray(void) (tools/qgarray.cpp:149)
66 by 0x4C261C41: PptDoc::~PptDoc(void) (include/qmemarray.h:60)
67 by 0x4C261F0E: PptXml::~PptXml(void) (pptxml.cc:44)
68 Address 0x4BB292A8 is 0 bytes inside a block of size 64 alloc'd
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +000069 at 0x4004318C: (inside vgpreload_memcheck.so)
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000070 by 0x4C21BC15: KLaola::readSBStream(int) const (klaola.cc:314)
71 by 0x4C21C155: KLaola::stream(KLaola::OLENode const *) (klaola.cc:416)
72 by 0x4C21788F: OLEFilter::convert(QCString const &) (olefilter.cc:272)
73
74 This isn't so helpful. Although you can tell there is a mismatch,
75 the names of the allocating and deallocating functions are no longer
76 visible. The same kind of thing occurs in various other messages
77 from valgrind.
78
79
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +000080-- Don't strip symbols from lib/valgrind/$platform/{cachegrind,
bartccf17de2008-07-04 15:14:35 +000081 callgrind,drd,exp-omega,helgrind,lackey,massif,memcheck,none}
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +000082 in the installation tree. Doing so will likely cause problems.
83 Removing the line number info is probably OK, although that has not
84 been tested by the Valgrind developers.
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000085
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000086
sewardjbc39ad22007-12-09 02:24:02 +000087-- Please test the final installation works by running it on something
88 huge. I suggest checking that it can start and exit successfully
89 both Firefox-2.0.0.X and OpenOffice.org 2.3.X. I use these as test
90 programs, and I know they fairly thoroughly exercise Valgrind. The
91 command lines to use are:
92
93 valgrind -v --trace-children=yes mozilla
94
95 valgrind -v --trace-children=yes soffice
sewardj83abe432002-07-01 08:46:27 +000096
97
mueller2b317b52004-01-02 23:11:35 +000098If you find any more hints/tips for packaging, please report
njn272b2162005-05-17 03:22:38 +000099it as a bugreport. See http://www.valgrind.org for details.