[Valgrind-announce] Valgrind-3.1.0 for {x86,amd64,ppc32}-linux is available

[Julian S. <js...@ac...>]

We are pleased to announce a new release of Valgrind, version 3.1.0.
It is 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 bugs, avoiding hours of
frustrating bug-hunting, and make your code more stable.  You can also
perform detailed time and space profiling to help speed up and slim
down your programs.

3.1.0 improves on 3.0.0 in three major areas.  AMD64 support is much
improved, with transparent interworking of 32- and 64-bit executables.
32-bit PowerPC is now officially supported and is eminently usable.
Finally, memory management for all platforms has been overhauled,
allowing larger programs to run successfully.

There are many other refinements and bug fixes.  See the attached
release notes for details.

In parallel with the 3.1.0 release, new versions of the Callgrind
profiling tool (0.10.1) and Valkyrie GUI (1.1.0) are available from
http://www.valgrind.org/downloads/current.html.

Many 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 3.1.0 (25 November 2005)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3.1.0 is a feature release with a number of significant improvements:
AMD64 support is much improved, PPC32 support is good enough to be
usable, and the handling of memory management and address space is
much more robust.  In detail:

- AMD64 support is much improved.  The 64-bit vs. 32-bit issues in
  3.0.X have been resolved, and it should "just work" now in all
  cases.  On AMD64 machines both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of
  Valgrind are built.  The right version will be invoked
  automatically, even when using --trace-children and mixing execution
  between 64-bit and 32-bit executables.  Also, many more instructions
  are supported.

- PPC32 support is now good enough to be usable.  It should work with
  all tools, but please let us know if you have problems.  Three
  classes of CPUs are supported: integer only (no FP, no Altivec),
  which covers embedded PPC uses, integer and FP but no Altivec
  (G3-ish), and CPUs capable of Altivec too (G4, G5).

- Valgrind's address space management has been overhauled.  As a
  result, Valgrind should be much more robust with programs that use
  large amounts of memory.  There should be many fewer "memory
  exhausted" messages, and debug symbols should be read correctly on
  large (eg. 300MB+) executables.  On 32-bit machines the full address
  space available to user programs (usually 3GB or 4GB) can be fully
  utilised.  On 64-bit machines up to 32GB of space is usable; when
  using Memcheck that means your program can use up to about 14GB.

  A side effect of this change is that Valgrind is no longer protected
  against wild writes by the client.  This feature was nice but relied
  on the x86 segment registers and so wasn't portable.

- Most users should not notice, but as part of the address space
  manager change, the way Valgrind is built has been changed.  Each
  tool is now built as a statically linked stand-alone executable,
  rather than as a shared object that is dynamically linked with the
  core.  The "valgrind" program invokes the appropriate tool depending
  on the --tool option.  This slightly increases the amount of disk
  space used by Valgrind, but it greatly simplified many things and
  removed Valgrind's dependence on glibc.

Please note that Addrcheck and Helgrind are still not working.  Work
is underway to reinstate them (or equivalents).  We apologise for the
inconvenience.

Other user-visible changes:

- The --weird-hacks option has been renamed --sim-hints.

- The --time-stamp option no longer gives an absolute date and time.
  It now prints the time elapsed since the program began.

- It should build with gcc-2.96.

- Valgrind can now run itself (see README_DEVELOPERS for how).
  This is not much use to you, but it means the developers can now
  profile Valgrind using Cachegrind.  As a result a couple of
  performance bad cases have been fixed.

- The XML output format has changed slightly.  See
  docs/internals/xml-output.txt.

- Core dumping has been reinstated (it was disabled in 3.0.0 and 3.0.1).
  If your program crashes while running under Valgrind, a core file with
  the name "vgcore.<pid>" will be created (if your settings allow core
  file creation).  Note that the floating point information is not all
  there.  If Valgrind itself crashes, the OS will create a normal core
  file.

The following are some user-visible changes that occurred in earlier
versions that may not have been announced, or were announced but not
widely noticed.  So we're mentioning them now.

- The --tool flag is optional once again;  if you omit it, Memcheck
  is run by default.

- The --num-callers flag now has a default value of 12.  It was
  previously 4.

- The --xml=yes flag causes Valgrind's output to be produced in XML
  format.  This is designed to make it easy for other programs to
  consume Valgrind's output.  The format is described in the file
  docs/internals/xml-format.txt.

- The --gen-suppressions flag supports an "all" value that causes every
  suppression to be printed without asking.

- The --log-file option no longer puts "pid" in the filename, eg. the
  old name "foo.pid12345" is now "foo.12345".

- There are several graphical front-ends for Valgrind, such as Valkyrie,
  Alleyoop and Valgui.  See http://www.valgrind.org/downloads/guis.html
  for a list.

BUGS FIXED:

109861  amd64 hangs at startup
110301  ditto
111554  valgrind crashes with Cannot allocate memory
111809  Memcheck tool doesn't start java
111901  cross-platform run of cachegrind fails on opteron
113468  (vgPlain_mprotect_range): Assertion 'r != -1' failed.
 92071  Reading debugging info uses too much memory
109744  memcheck loses track of mmap from direct ld-linux.so.2
110183  tail of page with _end
 82301  FV memory layout too rigid
 98278  Infinite recursion possible when allocating memory
108994  Valgrind runs out of memory due to 133x overhead
115643  valgrind cannot allocate memory
105974  vg_hashtable.c static hash table
109323  ppc32: dispatch.S uses Altivec insn, which doesn't work on POWER. 
109345  ptrace_setregs not yet implemented for ppc
110831  Would like to be able to run against both 32 and 64 bit 
        binaries on AMD64
110829  == 110831
111781  compile of valgrind-3.0.0 fails on my linux (gcc 2.X prob)
112670  Cachegrind: cg_main.c:486 (handleOneStatement ...
112941  vex x86: 0xD9 0xF4 (fxtract)
110201  == 112941
113015  vex amd64->IR: 0xE3 0x14 0x48 0x83 (jrcxz)
113126  Crash with binaries built with -gstabs+/-ggdb
104065  == 113126
115741  == 113126
113403  Partial SSE3 support on x86
113541  vex: Grp5(x86) (alt encoding inc/dec) case 1
113642  valgrind crashes when trying to read debug information
113810  vex x86->IR: 66 0F F6 (66 + PSADBW == SSE PSADBW)
113796  read() and write() do not work if buffer is in shared memory
113851  vex x86->IR: (pmaddwd): 0x66 0xF 0xF5 0xC7
114366  vex amd64 cannnot handle __asm__( "fninit" )
114412  vex amd64->IR: 0xF 0xAD 0xC2 0xD3 (128-bit shift, shrdq?)
114455  vex amd64->IR: 0xF 0xAC 0xD0 0x1 (also shrdq)
115590: amd64->IR: 0x67 0xE3 0x9 0xEB (address size override)
115953  valgrind svn r5042 does not build with parallel make (-j3)
116057  maximum instruction size - VG_MAX_INSTR_SZB too small?
116483  shmat failes with invalid argument
102202  valgrind crashes when realloc'ing until out of memory
109487  == 102202
110536  == 102202
112687  == 102202
111724  vex amd64->IR: 0x41 0xF 0xAB (more BT{,S,R,C} fun n games)
111748  vex amd64->IR: 0xDD 0xE2 (fucom)
111785  make fails if CC contains spaces
111829  vex x86->IR: sbb AL, Ib
111851  vex x86->IR: 0x9F 0x89 (lahf/sahf)
112031  iopl on AMD64 and README_MISSING_SYSCALL_OR_IOCTL update
112152  code generation for Xin_MFence on x86 with SSE0 subarch
112167  == 112152
112789  == 112152
112199  naked ar tool is used in vex makefile
112501  vex x86->IR: movq (0xF 0x7F 0xC1 0xF) (mmx MOVQ)
113583  == 112501
112538  memalign crash
113190  Broken links in docs/html/
113230  Valgrind sys_pipe on x86-64 wrongly thinks file descriptors
        should be 64bit
113996  vex amd64->IR: fucomp (0xDD 0xE9)
114196  vex x86->IR: out %eax,(%dx) (0xEF 0xC9 0xC3 0x90)
114289  Memcheck fails to intercept malloc when used in an uclibc environment
114756  mbind syscall support
114757  Valgrind dies with assertion: Assertion 'noLargerThan > 0' failed
114563  stack tracking module not informed when valgrind switches threads
114564  clone() and stacks
114565  == 114564
115496  glibc crashes trying to use sysinfo page
116200  enable fsetxattr, fgetxattr, and fremovexattr for amd64

(3.1.0RC1: 20 November 2005, vex r1466, valgrind r5224).
(3.1.0:    26 November 2005, vex r1471, valgrind r5235).