1 2 Greetings, packaging person! This information is aimed at people 3 building binary distributions of Valgrind. 4 5 Thanks for taking the time and effort to make a binary distribution of 6 Valgrind. The following notes may save you some trouble. 7 8 9 -- Do not ship your Linux distro with a completely stripped 10 /lib/ld.so. At least leave the debugging symbol names on -- line 11 number info isn't necessary. If you don't want to leave symbols on 12 ld.so, alternatively you can have your distro install ld.so's 13 debuginfo package by default, or make ld.so.debuginfo be a 14 requirement of your Valgrind RPM/DEB/whatever. 15 16 Reason for this is that Valgrind's Memcheck tool needs to intercept 17 calls to, and provide replacements for, some symbols in ld.so at 18 startup (most importantly strlen). If it cannot do that, Memcheck 19 shows a large number of false positives due to the highly optimised 20 strlen (etc) routines in ld.so. This has caused some trouble in 21 the past. As of version 3.3.0, on some targets (ppc32-linux, 22 ppc64-linux), Memcheck will simply stop at startup (and print an 23 error message) if such symbols are not present, because it is 24 infeasible to continue. 25 26 It's not like this is going to cost you much space. We only need 27 the symbols for ld.so (a few K at most). Not the debug info and 28 not any debuginfo or extra symbols for any other libraries. 29 30 31 -- (Unfortunate but true) When you configure to build with the 32 --prefix=/foo/bar/xyzzy option, the prefix /foo/bar/xyzzy gets 33 baked into valgrind. The consequence is that you _must_ install 34 valgrind at the location specified in the prefix. If you don't, 35 it may appear to work, but will break doing some obscure things, 36 particularly doing fork() and exec(). 37 38 So you can't build a relocatable RPM / whatever from Valgrind. 39 40 41 -- Don't strip the debug info off lib/valgrind/$platform/vgpreload*.so 42 in the installation tree. Either Valgrind won't work at all, or it 43 will still work if you do, but will generate less helpful error 44 messages. Here's an example: 45 46 Mismatched free() / delete / delete [] 47 at 0x40043249: free (vg_clientfuncs.c:171) 48 by 0x4102BB4E: QGArray::~QGArray(void) (tools/qgarray.cpp:149) 49 by 0x4C261C41: PptDoc::~PptDoc(void) (include/qmemarray.h:60) 50 by 0x4C261F0E: PptXml::~PptXml(void) (pptxml.cc:44) 51 Address 0x4BB292A8 is 0 bytes inside a block of size 64 alloc'd 52 at 0x4004318C: __builtin_vec_new (vg_clientfuncs.c:152) 53 by 0x4C21BC15: KLaola::readSBStream(int) const (klaola.cc:314) 54 by 0x4C21C155: KLaola::stream(KLaola::OLENode const *) (klaola.cc:416) 55 by 0x4C21788F: OLEFilter::convert(QCString const &) (olefilter.cc:272) 56 57 This tells you that some memory allocated with new[] was freed with 58 free(). 59 60 Mismatched free() / delete / delete [] 61 at 0x40043249: (inside vgpreload_memcheck.so) 62 by 0x4102BB4E: QGArray::~QGArray(void) (tools/qgarray.cpp:149) 63 by 0x4C261C41: PptDoc::~PptDoc(void) (include/qmemarray.h:60) 64 by 0x4C261F0E: PptXml::~PptXml(void) (pptxml.cc:44) 65 Address 0x4BB292A8 is 0 bytes inside a block of size 64 alloc'd 66 at 0x4004318C: (inside vgpreload_memcheck.so) 67 by 0x4C21BC15: KLaola::readSBStream(int) const (klaola.cc:314) 68 by 0x4C21C155: KLaola::stream(KLaola::OLENode const *) (klaola.cc:416) 69 by 0x4C21788F: OLEFilter::convert(QCString const &) (olefilter.cc:272) 70 71 This isn't so helpful. Although you can tell there is a mismatch, 72 the names of the allocating and deallocating functions are no longer 73 visible. The same kind of thing occurs in various other messages 74 from valgrind. 75 76 77 -- Don't strip symbols from lib/valgrind/* in the installation tree. 78 Doing so will likely cause problems. Removing the line number info is 79 probably OK (at least for some of the files in that directory), although 80 that has not been tested by the Valgrind developers. 81 82 83 -- Please test the final installation works by running it on something 84 huge. I suggest checking that it can start and exit successfully 85 both Firefox and OpenOffice.org. I use these as test programs, and I 86 know they fairly thoroughly exercise Valgrind. The command lines to use 87 are: 88 89 valgrind -v --trace-children=yes firefox 90 91 valgrind -v --trace-children=yes soffice 92 93 94 If you find any more hints/tips for packaging, please report 95 it as a bugreport. See http://www.valgrind.org for details. 96
