[Valgrind-announce] Valgrind-3.3.0 is available

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

We are pleased to announce a new release of Valgrind, version 3.3.0,
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.

3.3.0 is a feature release with many significant improvements and the
usual collection of bug fixes.  This release supports X86/Linux,
AMD64/Linux, PPC32/Linux and PPC64/Linux.  See the release notes below
for details.

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 3.3.0 (7 December 2007)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3.3.0 is a feature release with many significant improvements and the
usual collection of bug fixes.  This release supports X86/Linux,
AMD64/Linux, PPC32/Linux and PPC64/Linux.  Support for recent distros
(using gcc 4.3, glibc 2.6 and 2.7) has been added.

The main excitement in 3.3.0 is new and improved tools.  Helgrind
works again, Massif has been completely overhauled and much improved,
Cachegrind now does branch-misprediction profiling, and a new category
of experimental tools has been created, containing two new tools:
Omega and DRD.  There are many other smaller improvements.  In detail:

- Helgrind has been completely overhauled and works for the first time
  since Valgrind 2.2.0.  Supported functionality is: detection of
  misuses of the POSIX PThreads API, detection of potential deadlocks
  resulting from cyclic lock dependencies, and detection of data
  races.  Compared to the 2.2.0 Helgrind, the race detection algorithm
  has some significant improvements aimed at reducing the false error
  rate.  Handling of various kinds of corner cases has been improved.
  Efforts have been made to make the error messages easier to
  understand.  Extensive documentation is provided.

- Massif has been completely overhauled.  Instead of measuring
  space-time usage -- which wasn't always useful and many people found
  confusing -- it now measures space usage at various points in the
  execution, including the point of peak memory allocation.  Its
  output format has also changed: instead of producing PostScript
  graphs and HTML text, it produces a single text output (via the new
  'ms_print' script) that contains both a graph and the old textual
  information, but in a more compact and readable form.  Finally, the
  new version should be more reliable than the old one, as it has been
  tested more thoroughly.

- Cachegrind has been extended to do branch-misprediction profiling.
  Both conditional and indirect branches are profiled.  The default
  behaviour of Cachegrind is unchanged.  To use the new functionality,
  give the option --branch-sim=yes.

- A new category of "experimental tools" has been created.  Such tools
  may not work as well as the standard tools, but are included because
  some people will find them useful, and because exposure to a wider
  user group provides tool authors with more end-user feedback.  These
  tools have a "exp-" prefix attached to their names to indicate their
  experimental nature.  Currently there are two experimental tools:

  * exp-Omega: an instantaneous leak detector.  See
    exp-omega/docs/omega_introduction.txt.

  * exp-DRD: a data race detector based on the happens-before
    relation.  See exp-drd/docs/README.txt.

- Scalability improvements for very large programs, particularly those
  which have a million or more malloc'd blocks in use at once.  These
  improvements mostly affect Memcheck.  Memcheck is also up to 10%
  faster for all programs, with x86-linux seeing the largest
  improvement.

- Works well on the latest Linux distros.  Has been tested on Fedora
  Core 8 (x86, amd64, ppc32, ppc64) and openSUSE 10.3.  glibc 2.6 and
  2.7 are supported.  gcc-4.3 (in its current pre-release state) is
  supported.  At the same time, 3.3.0 retains support for older
  distros.

- The documentation has been modestly reorganised with the aim of
  making it easier to find information on common-usage scenarios.
  Some advanced material has been moved into a new chapter in the main
  manual, so as to unclutter the main flow, and other tidying up has
  been done.

- There is experimental support for AIX 5.3, both 32-bit and 64-bit
  processes.  You need to be running a 64-bit kernel to use Valgrind
  on a 64-bit executable.

- There have been some changes to command line options, which may
  affect you:

  * --log-file-exactly and 
    --log-file-qualifier options have been removed.

    To make up for this --log-file option has been made more powerful.
    It now accepts a %p format specifier, which is replaced with the
    process ID, and a %q{FOO} format specifier, which is replaced with
    the contents of the environment variable FOO.

  * --child-silent-after-fork=yes|no [no]

    Causes Valgrind to not show any debugging or logging output for
    the child process resulting from a fork() call.  This can make the
    output less confusing (although more misleading) when dealing with
    processes that create children.

  * --cachegrind-out-file, --callgrind-out-file and --massif-out-file

    These control the names of the output files produced by
    Cachegrind, Callgrind and Massif.  They accept the same %p and %q
    format specifiers that --log-file accepts.  --callgrind-out-file
    replaces Callgrind's old --base option.

  * Cachegrind's 'cg_annotate' script no longer uses the --<pid>
    option to specify the output file.  Instead, the first non-option
    argument is taken to be the name of the output file, and any
    subsequent non-option arguments are taken to be the names of
    source files to be annotated.

  * Cachegrind and Callgrind now use directory names where possible in
    their output files.  This means that the -I option to
    'cg_annotate' and 'callgrind_annotate' should not be needed in
    most cases.  It also means they can correctly handle the case
    where two source files in different directories have the same
    name.

- Memcheck offers a new suppression kind: "Jump".  This is for
  suppressing jump-to-invalid-address errors.  Previously you had to
  use an "Addr1" suppression, which didn't make much sense.

- Memcheck has new flags --malloc-fill=<hexnum> and
  --free-fill=<hexnum> which free malloc'd / free'd areas with the
  specified byte.  This can help shake out obscure memory corruption
  problems.  The definedness and addressibility of these areas is
  unchanged -- only the contents are affected.

- The behaviour of Memcheck's client requests VALGRIND_GET_VBITS and
  VALGRIND_SET_VBITS have changed slightly.  They no longer issue
  addressability errors -- if either array is partially unaddressable,
  they just return 3 (as before).  Also, SET_VBITS doesn't report
  definedness errors if any of the V bits are undefined.

- The following Memcheck client requests have been removed:
    VALGRIND_MAKE_NOACCESS
    VALGRIND_MAKE_WRITABLE
    VALGRIND_MAKE_READABLE
    VALGRIND_CHECK_WRITABLE
    VALGRIND_CHECK_READABLE
    VALGRIND_CHECK_DEFINED
  They were deprecated in 3.2.0, when equivalent but better-named client
  requests were added.  See the 3.2.0 release notes for more details.

- The behaviour of the tool Lackey has changed slightly.  First, the output
  from --trace-mem has been made more compact, to reduce the size of the
  traces.  Second, a new option --trace-superblocks has been added, which
  shows the addresses of superblocks (code blocks) as they are executed.

- The following bugs have been fixed.  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.

  n-i-bz  x86_linux_REDIR_FOR_index() broken
  n-i-bz  guest-amd64/toIR.c:2512 (dis_op2_E_G): Assertion `0' failed.
  n-i-bz  Support x86 INT insn (INT (0xCD) 0x40 - 0x43)
  n-i-bz  Add sys_utimensat system call for Linux x86 platform
   79844  Helgrind complains about race condition which does not exist
   82871  Massif output function names too short
   89061  Massif: ms_main.c:485 (get_XCon): Assertion `xpt->max_chi...'
   92615  Write output from Massif at crash
   95483  massif feature request: include peak allocation in report
  112163  MASSIF crashed with signal 7 (SIGBUS) after running 2 days
  119404  problems running setuid executables (partial fix)
  121629  add instruction-counting mode for timing
  127371  java vm giving unhandled instruction bytes: 0x26 0x2E 0x64 0x65
  129937  ==150380
  129576  Massif loses track of memory, incorrect graphs
  132132  massif --format=html output does not do html entity escaping
  132950  Heap alloc/usage summary
  133962  unhandled instruction bytes: 0xF2 0x4C 0xF 0x10
  134990  use -fno-stack-protector if possible
  136382  ==134990
  137396  I would really like helgrind to work again...
  137714  x86/amd64->IR: 0x66 0xF 0xF7 0xC6 (maskmovq, maskmovdq)
  141631  Massif: percentages don't add up correctly
  142706  massif numbers don't seem to add up
  143062  massif crashes on app exit with signal 8 SIGFPE
  144453  (get_XCon): Assertion 'xpt->max_children != 0' failed.
  145559  valgrind aborts when malloc_stats is called
  145609  valgrind aborts all runs with 'repeated section!'
  145622  --db-attach broken again on x86-64
  145837  ==149519
  145887  PPC32: getitimer() system call is not supported
  146252  ==150678
  146456  (update_XCon): Assertion 'xpt->curr_space >= -space_delta'...
  146701  ==134990
  146781  Adding support for private futexes
  147325  valgrind internal error on syscall (SYS_io_destroy, 0)
  147498  amd64->IR: 0xF0 0xF 0xB0 0xF (lock cmpxchg %cl,(%rdi))
  147545  Memcheck: mc_main.c:817 (get_sec_vbits8): Assertion 'n' failed.
  147628  SALC opcode 0xd6 unimplemented
  147825  crash on amd64-linux with gcc 4.2 and glibc 2.6 (CFI)
  148174  Incorrect type of freed_list_volume causes assertion [...]
  148447  x86_64 : new NOP codes: 66 66 66 66 2e 0f 1f
  149182  PPC Trap instructions not implemented in valgrind
  149504  Assertion hit on alloc_xpt->curr_space >= -space_delta
  149519  ppc32: V aborts with SIGSEGV on execution of a signal handler
  149892  ==137714
  150044  SEGV during stack deregister
  150380  dwarf/gcc interoperation (dwarf3 read problems)
  150408  ==148447
  150678  guest-amd64/toIR.c:3741 (dis_Grp5): Assertion `sz == 4' failed
  151209  V unable to execute programs for users with UID > 2^16
  151938  help on --db-command= misleading
  152022  subw $0x28, %%sp causes assertion failure in memcheck
  152357  inb and outb not recognized in 64-bit mode
  152501  vex x86->IR: 0x27 0x66 0x89 0x45 (daa) 
  152818  vex x86->IR: 0xF3 0xAC 0xFC 0x9C (rep lodsb)

Developer-visible changes:

- The names of some functions and types within the Vex IR have
  changed.  Run 'svn log -r1689 VEX/pub/libvex_ir.h' for full details.
  Any existing standalone tools will have to be updated to reflect
  these changes.  The new names should be clearer.  The file
  VEX/pub/libvex_ir.h is also much better commented.

- A number of new debugging command line options have been added.
  These are mostly of use for debugging the symbol table and line
  number readers:

  --trace-symtab-patt=<patt> limit debuginfo tracing to obj name <patt>
  --trace-cfi=no|yes        show call-frame-info details? [no]
  --debug-dump=syms         mimic /usr/bin/readelf --syms
  --debug-dump=line         mimic /usr/bin/readelf --debug-dump=line
  --debug-dump=frames       mimic /usr/bin/readelf --debug-dump=frames
  --sym-offsets=yes|no      show syms in form 'name+offset' ? [no]

- Internally, the code base has been further factorised and
  abstractified, particularly with respect to support for non-Linux
  OSs.

(3.3.0.RC1:  2 Dec 2007, vex r1803, valgrind r7268).
(3.3.0.RC2:  5 Dec 2007, vex r1804, valgrind r7282).
(3.3.0.RC3:  9 Dec 2007, vex r1804, valgrind r7288).
(3.3.0:     10 Dec 2007, vex r1804, valgrind r7290).