[Valgrind-users] Using valgrind on a system with nvidia

[Paul H. <pa...@ha...>]

My company bought a new Linux system so I can run valgrind faster.  The
purchasing department doesn't understand Linux, so it came with Windows XP
installed and a high end Nvidia graphics card.  Getting rid of Windows XP
was easy, but I think I'm stuck with the Nvidia card.  The "nv" driver
mostly works, but text was getting messed up when xterms scrolled.  So I
tried the drivers from Nvidia.  Now my xterms worked, but valgrind stopped
working.

As many are painfully aware, the problem isn't the hardware, it is the
drivers.  Specifically it's /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.0.4349 and libraries it
pulls in.

My system is mostly Debian unstable.  After foolishly installing the
Nvidia drivers, I got valgrind to work again by typing:

  apt-get install --reinstall xlibmesa3-gl

This puts back the /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2 that the Nvidia install
script removed.  The nvidia stuff is libGL.so.1.0 and the mesa3-gl is
 .1.2, so I can probably play with version numbers to get either library.
The mesa library is fast enough for me, since I spend far more time
working on the CAD program than I do actually running the CAD program with
large models. Most importantly, my xterms don't get messed up when I
scroll them.

I've tried valgrind 1.0.4, 1.9.5 and the CVS tip (why does it call itself
1.9.4?), and they all work on this somewhat bastardized OpenGL
configuration.

Performance with the Mesa libGL and the "nvidia" driver is much better
than it was with the "nv" driver.  (That might just mean I screwed up the
"nv" driver configuration.)

I spent some time playing with LD_LIBRARY_PATH to get different libraries,
this worked, but it looked like I'd have to spend time maintaining
multiple suppression files, since our older Linux systems aren't cursed
with the Nvidia hardware.

--
Paul Haas, pa...@Ha...