Valgrind Release 3.9.0

http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/dist.news.html

by conductor • 13 years ago

142 34 13 years ago

OS X 10.8 supported... 1 year after 10.8 is released, a few weeks after 10.9 is released. :( I'm not blaming the authors. The OS X kernel is a moving target. But this does make Valgrind rather useless on OS X. Every time I want to use Valgrind I'm forced to use Linux.

dman• 13 years ago

Maybe someone from apple needs to make sure that newly supported kernels work on valgrind?

throwaway00942• 13 years ago

Valgrind's emulation environment wraps syscalls to understand how they read/modify memory. Any time you add a new syscall or change an existing syscall, valgrind needs to be updated. Presumably 10.9 is unsupported due to new/modified syscalls; a basic program using a subset of POSIX standard syscalls may work just fine under valgrind on 10.9.

Apple should probably employ someone full-time to support valgrind on OS X, just for the in-house benefits...

_wmd• 13 years ago

Just another reason not to run your development environment on the bleeding edge

jevinskie• 13 years ago

Customers often require bleeding edge support, often so they can use features present in the new OS.

frozenport• 13 years ago

Just another reason not to run your development environment on a Mac

acdha• 13 years ago

Just another reason not to run your development environment on the bleeding edge

If you heavily depend on non-core tools, yes. Otherwise, though, for 99% of developers it was install-reboot-resume work — and the advantages of being able to test what your users use are significant as well.

fjarlq• 13 years ago

Actually OS X 10.8 only has "limited support" by Valgrind 3.9.0. That was what they said about the previous version of Valgrind as well, but in the latest version the limited support has been "significantly improved".

In any case, several basic features of the previous version of Valgrind work on OSX 10.8/10.9, so I don't think it is correct to say Valgrind is useless on OS X.

It would be more useful if you explained the specific problems with Valgrind on OSX that force you to use Linux.

ngoldbaum• 13 years ago

For what it's worth, I've been using homebrew's valgrind on OS X 10.8 successfully for a while now. I guess the support isn't full (and things like dsym directories are necessary to get debug symbols working correctly) but it's good enough for my purposes.

mukundmr• 13 years ago

Why don't you use XCode's profiling tools? They are quite comprehensive and XCode is free.

chengiz• 13 years ago

Helgrind: False errors resulting from the use of statically initialised mutexes and condition variables have been removed. False errors resulting from the use of pthread_cond_waits that timeout, have been removed.

Awesome. There was no good way to write suppressions for those. I'm glad this got done.

izietto• 13 years ago

can someone suggest me a good tutorial for Valgrind? Thank you

conductor• 13 years ago

The official Quick Start Guide [0] is decent I think. Do you need something specific?

[0] http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/QuickStart.html

a_bonobo• 13 years ago

Zed Shaw's Learn C The Hard Way [1] makes extensive use of Valgrind, with a nice crash course in [2]

[1] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/

[2] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ex4.html

girvo• 13 years ago

Somewhat off topic, but I've been learning C through Zed's LCTHW -- and I must say I'm rather impressed at how well it's allowed me to properly learn the concepts involved.

I do wish it was further along though, I haven't seen much change in the month or so I've been working through it :(

X-Istence• 13 years ago

No FreeBSD support mentioned :-(

stass3• 13 years ago

I'll try to get the valgrind-freebsd updated some time this week. So it's coming.

stass3• 13 years ago

Hey, I uploaded the preliminary version of valgrind-freebsd to https://bitbucket.org/stass/valgrind-freebsd/downloads. It seems that there are no regression compared to 3.8.1, but please test, if you can, with your applications and report any errors :)

WalterBright2• 13 years ago

Valgrind is a truly awesome product. It has saved me countless hours tracking down weird memory corruption errors.

blueblob2• 13 years ago

I could not agree more. My only complaint about valgrind was that I was not smart enough to figure out how to use it on a FUSE filesystem.

wizzardy• 13 years ago

Hopefully at the end you figured it out. one of the option is to set --trace-children to "no".

yukkurishite• 13 years ago

Absolutely. Valgrind is the holy grail of C/CPP programming.

csmuk• 13 years ago

Definitely.

I write C on a non-valgrind capable platform. It's literally scary what you missed when you take what you think is working properly and throw it through valgrind.

stass3• 13 years ago

A good discipline also helps. ;)

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

I hear lots of praise for Valgrind. Resorted to it on occasion, but the results were less than stellar. Other than a spew of irrelevant 'leaks' (single-allocations at start that last the life of the program, intentional and not leaks at all) it has, for me, never caught anything important.

Memory corruption errors are hard to find and I'd love a tool that helped me find them. Systematic leaks (app leaks over hours or days) would also be good to find. I've had zero luck with valgrind. Always had to resort to finding them the old-fashioned way.

froydnj• 13 years ago

Use --show-possibly-lost=no to avoid those "possibly lost" reports.

Valgrind Release 3.9.0

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