We are pleased to announce a new release of Valgrind, version 3.6.0,
available from http://www.valgrind.org.
Valgrind is an open-source suite of simulation based debugging and
profiling tools. With the tools that come with Valgrind, you can
automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, which
avoids hours of frustrating bug-hunting, and makes your code more
stable. You can also perform detailed time and space profiling to
help speed up and slim down your programs.
3.6.0 is a feature release with many significant improvements and the
usual collection of bug fixes.
This release supports X86/Linux, AMD64/Linux, ARM/Linux, PPC32/Linux,
PPC64/Linux, X86/Darwin and AMD64/Darwin. Support for recent distros
and toolchain components (glibc 2.12, gcc 4.5, OSX 10.6) has been added.
A new version, 2.0.0, of the Valkyrie GUI is also available. Valkyrie
is a Qt4-based GUI for Valgrind's Memcheck and Helgrind tools.
Our thanks to all those who contribute to Valgrind's development.
This release represents a great deal of time, energy and effort on the
part of many people.
Happy (and productive) debugging and profiling,
-- The Valgrind Developers
Release 3.6.0 (21 October 2010)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3.6.0 is a feature release with many significant improvements and the
usual collection of bug fixes.
This release supports X86/Linux, AMD64/Linux, ARM/Linux, PPC32/Linux,
PPC64/Linux, X86/Darwin and AMD64/Darwin. Support for recent distros
and toolchain components (glibc 2.12, gcc 4.5, OSX 10.6) has been added.
-------------------------
Here are some highlights. Details are shown further down:
* Support for ARM/Linux.
* Support for recent Linux distros: Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14.
* Support for Mac OS X 10.6, both 32- and 64-bit executables.
* Support for the SSE4.2 instruction set.
* Enhancements to the Cachegrind and Callgrind profilers, including
the ability to handle CPUs with three levels of cache.
* A new experimental heap profiler, DHAT.
* A huge number of bug fixes and small enhancements.
-------------------------
Here are details of the above changes, together with descriptions of
many other changes, and a list of fixed bugs.
* ================== PLATFORM CHANGES =================
* Support for ARM/Linux. Valgrind now runs on ARMv7 capable CPUs
running Linux. It is known to work on Ubuntu 10.04, Ubuntu 10.10,
and Maemo 5, so you can run Valgrind on your Nokia N900 if you want.
This requires a CPU capable of running the ARMv7-A instruction set
(Cortex A5, A8 and A9). Valgrind provides fairly complete coverage
of the user space instruction set, including ARM and Thumb integer
code, VFPv3, NEON and V6 media instructions. The Memcheck,
Cachegrind and Massif tools work properly; other tools work to
varying degrees.
* Support for recent Linux distros (Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14), along
with support for recent releases of the underlying toolchain
components, notably gcc-4.5 and glibc-2.12.
* Support for Mac OS X 10.6, both 32- and 64-bit executables. 64-bit
support also works much better on OS X 10.5, and is as solid as
32-bit support now.
* Support for the SSE4.2 instruction set. SSE4.2 is supported in
64-bit mode. In 32-bit mode, support is only available up to and
including SSSE3. Some exceptions: SSE4.2 AES instructions are not
supported in 64-bit mode, and 32-bit mode does in fact support the
bare minimum SSE4 instructions to needed to run programs on Mac OS X
10.6 on 32-bit targets.
* Support for IBM POWER6 cpus has been improved. The Power ISA up to
and including version 2.05 is supported.
* ==================== TOOL CHANGES ====================
* Cachegrind has a new processing script, cg_diff, which finds the
difference between two profiles. It's very useful for evaluating
the performance effects of a change in a program.
Related to this change, the meaning of cg_annotate's (rarely-used)
--threshold option has changed; this is unlikely to affect many
people, if you do use it please see the user manual for details.
* Callgrind now can do branch prediction simulation, similar to
Cachegrind. In addition, it optionally can count the number of
executed global bus events. Both can be used for a better
approximation of a "Cycle Estimation" as derived event (you need to
update the event formula in KCachegrind yourself).
* Cachegrind and Callgrind now refer to the LL (last-level) cache
rather than the L2 cache. This is to accommodate machines with
three levels of caches -- if Cachegrind/Callgrind auto-detects the
cache configuration of such a machine it will run the simulation as
if the L2 cache isn't present. This means the results are less
likely to match the true result for the machine, but
Cachegrind/Callgrind's results are already only approximate, and
should not be considered authoritative. The results are still
useful for giving a general idea about a program's locality.
* Massif has a new option, --pages-as-heap, which is disabled by
default. When enabled, instead of tracking allocations at the level
of heap blocks (as allocated with malloc/new/new[]), it instead
tracks memory allocations at the level of memory pages (as mapped by
mmap, brk, etc). Each mapped page is treated as its own block.
Interpreting the page-level output is harder than the heap-level
output, but this option is useful if you want to account for every
byte of memory used by a program.
* DRD has two new command-line options: --free-is-write and
--trace-alloc. The former allows to detect reading from already freed
memory, and the latter allows tracing of all memory allocations and
deallocations.
* DRD has several new annotations. Custom barrier implementations can
now be annotated, as well as benign races on static variables.
* DRD's happens before / happens after annotations have been made more
powerful, so that they can now also be used to annotate e.g. a smart
pointer implementation.
* Helgrind's annotation set has also been drastically improved, so as
to provide to users a general set of annotations to describe locks,
semaphores, barriers and condition variables. Annotations to
describe thread-safe reference counted heap objects have also been
added.
* Memcheck has a new command-line option, --show-possibly-lost, which
is enabled by default. When disabled, the leak detector will not
show possibly-lost blocks.
* A new experimental heap profiler, DHAT (Dynamic Heap Analysis Tool),
has been added. DHAT keeps track of allocated heap blocks, and also
inspects every memory reference to see which block (if any) is being
accessed. This gives a lot of insight into block lifetimes,
utilisation, turnover, liveness, and the location of hot and cold
fields. You can use DHAT to do hot-field profiling.
* ==================== OTHER CHANGES ====================
* Improved support for unfriendly self-modifying code: the extra
overhead incurred by --smc-check=all has been reduced by
approximately a factor of 5 as compared with 3.5.0.
* Ability to show directory names for source files in error messages.
This is combined with a flexible mechanism for specifying which
parts of the paths should be shown. This is enabled by the new flag
--fullpath-after.
* A new flag, --require-text-symbol, which will stop the run if a
specified symbol is not found it a given shared object when it is
loaded into the process. This makes advanced working with function
intercepting and wrapping safer and more reliable.
* Improved support for the Valkyrie GUI, version 2.0.0. GUI output
and control of Valgrind is now available for the tools Memcheck and
Helgrind. XML output from Valgrind is available for Memcheck,
Helgrind and exp-Ptrcheck.
* More reliable stack unwinding on amd64-linux, particularly in the
presence of function wrappers, and with gcc-4.5 compiled code.
* Modest scalability (performance improvements) for massive
long-running applications, particularly for those with huge amounts
of code.
* Support for analyzing programs running under Wine with has been
improved. The header files <valgrind/valgrind.h>,
<valgrind/memcheck.h> and <valgrind/drd.h> can now be used in
Windows-programs compiled with MinGW or one of the Microsoft Visual
Studio compilers.
* A rare but serious error in the 64-bit x86 CPU simulation was fixed.
The 32-bit simulator was not affected. This did not occur often,
but when it did would usually crash the program under test.
Bug 245925.
* A large number of bugs were fixed. These are shown below.
* A number of bugs were investigated, and were candidates for fixing,
but are not fixed in 3.6.0, due to lack of developer time. They may
get fixed in later releases. They are:
194402 vex amd64->IR: 0x48 0xF 0xAE 0x4 0x24 0x49 (FXSAVE64)
212419 false positive "lock order violated" (A+B vs A)
213685 Undefined value propagates past dependency breaking instruction
216837 Incorrect instrumentation of NSOperationQueue on Darwin
237920 valgrind segfault on fork failure
242137 support for code compiled by LLVM-2.8
242423 Another unknown Intel cache config value
243232 Inconsistent Lock Orderings report with trylock
243483 ppc: callgrind triggers VEX assertion failure
243935 Helgrind: implementation of ANNOTATE_HAPPENS_BEFORE() is wrong
244677 Helgrind crash hg_main.c:616 (map_threads_lookup): Assertion
'thr' failed.
246152 callgrind internal error after pthread_cancel on 32 Bit Linux
249435 Analyzing wine programs with callgrind triggers a crash
250038 ppc64: Altivec lvsr and lvsl instructions fail their regtest
250065 Handling large allocations
250101 huge "free" memory usage due to m_mallocfree.c
"superblocks fragmentation"
251569 vex amd64->IR: 0xF 0x1 0xF9 0x8B 0x4C 0x24 (RDTSCP)
252091 Callgrind on ARM does not detect function returns correctly
252600 [PATCH] Allow lhs to be a pointer for shl/shr
254420 memory pool tracking broken
n-i-bz support for adding symbols for JIT generated code
The following bugs have been fixed or resolved. Note that "n-i-bz"
stands for "not in bugzilla" -- that is, a bug that was reported to us
but never got a bugzilla entry. We encourage you to file bugs in
bugzilla (http://bugs.kde.org/enter_valgrind_bug.cgi) rather than
mailing the developers (or mailing lists) directly -- bugs that are
not entered into bugzilla tend to get forgotten about or ignored.
To see details of a given bug, visit
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=XXXXXX
where XXXXXX is the bug number as listed below.
135264 dcbzl instruction missing
142688 == 250799
153699 Valgrind should report unaligned reads with movdqa
180217 == 212335
190429 Valgrind reports lost of errors in ld.so
with x86_64 2.9.90 glibc
197266 valgrind appears to choke on the xmms instruction
"roundsd" on x86_64
197988 Crash when demangling very large symbol names
202315 unhandled syscall: 332 (inotify_init1)
203256 Add page-level profiling to Massif
205093 dsymutil=yes needs quotes, locking (partial fix)
205241 Snow Leopard 10.6 support (partial fix)
206600 Leak checker fails to upgrade indirect blocks when their
parent becomes reachable
210935 port valgrind.h (not valgrind) to win32 so apps run under
wine can make client requests
211410 vex amd64->IR: 0x15 0xFF 0xFF 0x0 0x0 0x89
within Linux ip-stack checksum functions
212335 unhandled instruction bytes: 0xF3 0xF 0xBD 0xC0
(lzcnt %eax,%eax)
213685 Undefined value propagates past dependency breaking instruction
(partial fix)
215914 Valgrind inserts bogus empty environment variable
217863 == 197988
219538 adjtimex syscall wrapper wrong in readonly adjtime mode
222545 shmat fails under valgind on some arm targets
222560 ARM NEON support
230407 == 202315
231076 == 202315
232509 Docs build fails with formatting inside <title></title> elements
232793 == 202315
235642 [PATCH] syswrap-linux.c: support evdev EVIOCG* ioctls
236546 vex x86->IR: 0x66 0xF 0x3A 0xA
237202 vex amd64->IR: 0xF3 0xF 0xB8 0xC0 0x49 0x3B
237371 better support for VALGRIND_MALLOCLIKE_BLOCK
237485 symlink (syscall 57) is not supported on Mac OS
237723 sysno == 101 exp-ptrcheck: the 'impossible' happened:
unhandled syscall
238208 is_just_below_ESP doesn't take into account red-zone
238345 valgrind passes wrong $0 when executing a shell script
238679 mq_timedreceive syscall doesn't flag the reception buffer
as "defined"
238696 fcntl command F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC not supported
238713 unhandled instruction bytes: 0x66 0xF 0x29 0xC6
238713 unhandled instruction bytes: 0x66 0xF 0x29 0xC6
238745 3.5.0 Make fails on PPC Altivec opcodes, though configure
says "Altivec off"
239992 vex amd64->IR: 0x48 0xF 0xC4 0xC1 0x0 0x48
240488 == 197988
240639 == 212335
241377 == 236546
241903 == 202315
241920 == 212335
242606 unhandled syscall: setegid (in Ptrcheck)
242814 Helgrind "Impossible has happened" during
QApplication::initInstance();
243064 Valgrind attempting to read debug information from iso
243270 Make stack unwinding in Valgrind wrappers more reliable
243884 exp-ptrcheck: the 'impossible happened: unhandled syscall
sysno = 277 (mq_open)
244009 exp-ptrcheck unknown syscalls in analyzing lighttpd
244493 ARM VFP d16-d31 registers support
244670 add support for audit_session_self syscall on Mac OS 10.6
244921 The xml report of helgrind tool is not well format
244923 In the xml report file, the <preamble> not escape the
xml char, eg '<','&','>'
245535 print full path names in plain text reports
245925 x86-64 red zone handling problem
246258 Valgrind not catching integer underruns + new [] s
246311 reg/reg cmpxchg doesn't work on amd64
246549 unhandled syscall unix:277 while testing 32-bit Darwin app
246888 Improve Makefile.vex.am
247510 [OS X 10.6] Memcheck reports unaddressable bytes passed
to [f]chmod_extended
247526 IBM POWER6 (ISA 2.05) support is incomplete
247561 Some leak testcases fails due to reachable addresses in
caller save regs
247875 sizeofIRType to handle Ity_I128
247894 [PATCH] unhandled syscall sys_readahead
247980 Doesn't honor CFLAGS passed to configure
248373 darwin10.supp is empty in the trunk
248822 Linux FIBMAP ioctl has int parameter instead of long
248893 [PATCH] make readdwarf.c big endianess safe to enable
unwinding on big endian systems
249224 Syscall 336 not supported (SYS_proc_info)
249359 == 245535
249775 Incorrect scheme for detecting NEON capabilities of host CPU
249943 jni JVM init fails when using valgrind
249991 Valgrind incorrectly declares AESKEYGENASSIST support
since VEX r2011
249996 linux/arm: unhandled syscall: 181 (__NR_pwrite64)
250799 frexp$fenv_access_off function generates SIGILL
250998 vex x86->IR: unhandled instruction bytes: 0x66 0x66 0x66 0x2E
251251 support pclmulqdq insn
251362 valgrind: ARM: attach to debugger either fails or provokes
kernel oops
251674 Unhandled syscall 294
251818 == 254550
254257 Add support for debugfiles found by build-id
254550 [PATCH] Implement DW_ATE_UTF (DWARF4)
254646 Wrapped functions cause stack misalignment on OS X
(and possibly Linux)
254556 ARM: valgrinding anything fails with SIGSEGV for 0xFFFF0FA0
(3.6.0: 21 October 2010, vex r2068, valgrind r11471).
-----------------------------------------
|