[Valgrind-developers] [PATCH] Valgrind for PowerPC

[Paul M. <pa...@sa...>]

I have ported valgrind to PowerPC and I have it running quite nicely,
on Linux of course.

A patch against valgrind-2.1.0 to add PowerPC support is at:

http://ozlabs.org/~paulus/ppc-valgrind.patch.gz

I didn't include the patch in this message because it is moderately
large (280kB uncompressed) and I thought the mailing list software
might reject it.

It would be good if you (valgrind developers) could look at the patch
and give me any comments you have.  I would like to get this stuff
included in future releases.

I have ended up putting in quite a few ifdefs in the code, as that was
the quickest way to make the changes I needed to get it working on
PowerPC.  Now that it is working I think it would be worth looking
over what things need to be abstracted out and what might be the best
way to do that.  Hopefully that will reduce the number of ifdefs.

There are still a few limitations and things left to do:

* It only supports 32-bit instructions at present (doesn't handle the
  64-bit part of the PowerPC architecture).

* It doesn't handle Altivec instructions (Altivec provides
  short-vector SIMD capabilities, a bit like MMX or SSE).

* I haven't generated any suppressions files for libc.so or ld.so.  I
  seem to get lots of errors from them, particularly for programs that
  use dlopen.  I have some prototype code to improve the valid bit
  computations for ADD and CMP0 (compare against 0) which reduce the
  reported errors a lot.  Glibc seems to like using the add-fefefeff
  and or-7f7f7f7f tricks a lot.  I have a formula for getting the
  valid bits for the result of an ADD exactly without too much effort.

* The code to set cache parameters in cachegrind is pretty minimal at
  present.

* I punted on VG_(saneUInstr) for now.  I really should go back and
  fill in the parts for the new UInstrs I added.

Regards,
Paul.