What is Valgrind ?
Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools. There are Valgrind tools that can automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail. You can also use Valgrind to build new tools.
Get the current release from http://valgrind.org/downloads/current.html
download valgrind-3.5.0.tar.bz2
tar jxvf valgrind-3.5.0
cd valgrind-3.5.0
./configure
make
su -c 'make install' (valgrind execute will install in /usr/local/bin)
Running valgrind to detect memory leak
Valgrind is now integrated with our build on Linux and as such it will execute during a standard run of the tests in maven. If you want to trigger the maven run of the tests under valgrind on Linux:
- cd <BLACKTIE_SRC_DIR>/<PROJECT_NAME>
- mvn cpp:test
- The output will be located at <BLACKTIE_SRC_DIR>/<PROJECT_NAME>/target/cpp-test-classes/<PROJECT_NAME>-valgrind.log
Results of valgrind
The details are in the Memcheck section of the user manual.
In short:
"definitely lost" means your program is leaking memory -- fix it!
"possibly lost" means your program is probably leaking memory, unless you're doing funny things with pointers.
"still reachable" means your program is probably ok -- it didn't free some memory it could have. This is quite common and often reasonable. Don't use
--show-reachable=yesif you don't want to see these reports."suppressed" means that a leak error has been suppressed. There are some suppressions in the default suppression files. You can ignore suppressed errors.
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