[Valgrind-users] memcheck is getting SIGKILLed before leak report is output

[Bresalier, R. (N. - US/M. Hill) <rob...@no...>]

When running memcheck on a massive monolith embedded executable (237MB stripped, 1.8GiB unstripped), after I stop the executable under valgrind I see the "HEAP SUMMARY" but then valgrind dies before any leak reports are printed. The parent process sees that the return status of memcheck is that it was SIGKILLed (status returned in waitpid call is '9'). I am 99.9% sure that the parent process is not the one sending the SIGKILL. Is it possible that valgrind SIGKILLs itself? Is there a reason that the linux kernel (Wind River Linux) could be sending a SIGKILL to valgrind/memcheck? I do not see any messages about Out of Memory/OOM killer killing valgrind. Previous experience with this executable is that there are almost 3 million leak reports (most of them are "still reachable"), could that be occupying too much memory. Any ideas/advice to figure out what is going on?

We don't seem to get the sigkill if valgrind/memcheck is stopped earlier in the life of this executable. But to find the leak I need it to run past that point.

I've tried many different versions of valgrind that have worked to find leaks on this executable in the past (3.16.1, 3.18.1, 3.19.0) but they all have this same issue of being sigkilled before any leaks get printed.

One thing I see in the logs is about "unhandled ioctl 0xa5 with no size/direction hints". Could this be a trigger for this crash/sigkill?

Would appreciate any ideas/advice.

Thanks,
Rob