[Valgrind-users] ARMv8 port available for testing

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

The trunk now contains a port to AArch64 ARMv8 -- loosely, the
64-bit ARM architecture.  It has now reached a stage of being
useful for real debugging, and, in turn, could do with wider
testing.

Memcheck works and has a noise (false-error) level that is
comparable with other targets.  All the basic functionality --
detection of uninitialised value uses, invalid memory accesses,
detection of leaks, and origin tracking -- is available.  Other
tools -- Lackey, Cachegrind, Callgrind, Massif, DRD and Helgrind
-- work to some extent, but have not been extensively tested.

Current limitations are:

* Incomplete support of vector (SIMD) instructions.  Anything
  created by gcc-4.8.2 -O3, including SIMD code via
  autovectorization, works.  Completion of the SIMD support is
  ongoing.

* Incomplete syscall support.  Enough system calls are supported
  for large programs to work, but some are still unsupported.

* Integration with the built in GDB server is incomplete.

There has been extensive testing of the supported of integer, FP
and SIMD instructions.  At least one large application -- Firefox
26 -- is able to start up and quit.  The port is under active
development and will ship as part of the next release, Valgrind 3.10.

See README.aarch64 for instructions on how to build and run the port.

J