## 2. Using and understanding the Valgrind core

This chapter describes the Valgrind core services, flags and behaviours. That means it is relevant regardless of what particular tool you are using. The information should be sufficient for you to make effective day-to-day use of Valgrind. Advanced topics related to the Valgrind core are described in Valgrind's core: advanced topics.

A point of terminology: most references to "Valgrind" in this chapter refer to the Valgrind core services.

## 2.1. What Valgrind does with your program

Valgrind is designed to be as non-intrusive as possible. It works directly with existing executables. You don't need to recompile, relink, or otherwise modify, the program to be checked.

Simply put `valgrind --tool=tool_name` at the start of the command line normally used to run the program. For example, if want to run the command `ls -l` using the heavyweight memory-checking tool Memcheck, issue the command:

    valgrind --tool=memcheck ls -l

Memcheck is the default, so if you want to use it you can omit the `--tool` flag.

Regardless of which tool is in use, Valgrind takes control of your program before it starts. Debugging information is read from the executable and associated libraries, so that error messages and other outputs can be phrased in terms of source code locations, when appropriate.

Your program is then run on a synthetic CPU provided by the Valgrind core. As new code is executed for the first time, the core hands the code to the selected tool. The tool adds its own instrumentation code to this and hands the result back to the core, which coordinates the continued execution of this instrumented code.

The amount of instrumentation code added varies widely between tools. At one end of the scale, Memcheck adds code to check every memory access and every value computed, making it run 10-50 times slower than natively. At the other end of the spectrum, the ultra-trivial "none" tool (also referred to as Nulgrind) adds no instrumentation at all and causes in total "only" about a 4 times slowdown.

Valgrind simulates every single instruction your program executes. Because of this, the active tool checks, or profiles, not only the code in your application but also in all supporting dynamically-linked (`.so`-format) libraries, including the GNU C library, the X client libraries, Qt, if you work with KDE, and so on.

If you're using an error-detection tool, Valgrind may detect errors in libraries, for example the GNU C or X11 libraries, which you have to use. You might not be interested in these errors, since you probably have no control over that code. Therefore, Valgrind allows you to selectively suppress errors, by recording them in a suppressions file which is read when Valgrind starts up. The build mechanism attempts to select suppressions which give reasonable behaviour for the C library and X11 client library versions detected on your machine. To make it easier to write suppressions, you can use the `--gen-suppressions=yes` option. This tells Valgrind to print out a suppression for each reported error, which you can then copy into a suppressions file.

Different error-checking tools report different kinds of errors. The suppression mechanism therefore allows you to say which tool or tool(s) each suppression applies to.

## 2.2. Getting started

First off, consider whether it might be beneficial to recompile your application and supporting libraries with debugging info enabled (the `-g` flag). Without debugging info, the best Valgrind tools will be able to do is guess which function a particular piece of code belongs to, which makes both error messages and profiling output nearly useless. With `-g`, you'll get messages which point directly to the relevant source code lines.

Another flag you might like to consider, if you are working with C++, is `-fno-inline`. That makes it easier to see the function-call chain, which can help reduce confusion when navigating around large C++ apps. For example, debugging OpenOffice.org with Memcheck is a bit easier when using this flag. You don't have to do this, but doing so helps Valgrind produce more accurate and less confusing error reports. Chances are you're set up like this already, if you intended to debug your program with GNU gdb, or some other debugger.

If you are planning to use Memcheck: On rare occasions, compiler optimisations (at `-O2` and above, and sometimes `-O1`) have been observed to generate code which fools Memcheck into wrongly reporting uninitialised value errors, or missing uninitialised value errors. We have looked in detail into fixing this, and unfortunately the result is that doing so would give a further significant slowdown in what is already a slow tool. So the best solution is to turn off optimisation altogether. Since this often makes things unmanageably slow, a reasonable compromise is to use `-O`. This gets you the majority of the benefits of higher optimisation levels whilst keeping relatively small the chances of false positives or false negatives from Memcheck. Also, you should compile your code with `-Wall` because it can identify some or all of the problems that Valgrind can miss at the higher optimisation levels. (Using `-Wall` is also a good idea in general.) All other tools (as far as we know) are unaffected by optimisation level.

Valgrind understands both the older "stabs" debugging format, used by gcc versions prior to 3.1, and the newer DWARF2 and DWARF3 formats used by gcc 3.1 and later. We continue to develop our debug-info readers, although the majority of effort will naturally enough go into the newer DWARF2/3 reader.

When you're ready to roll, just run your application as you would normally, but place `valgrind --tool=tool_name` in front of your usual command-line invocation. Note that you should run the real (machine-code) executable here. If your application is started by, for example, a shell or perl script, you'll need to modify it to invoke Valgrind on the real executables. Running such scripts directly under Valgrind will result in you getting error reports pertaining to `/bin/sh`, `/usr/bin/perl`, or whatever interpreter you're using. This may not be what you want and can be confusing. You can force the issue by giving the flag `--trace-children=yes`, but confusion is still likely.

## 2.3. The Commentary

Valgrind tools write a commentary, a stream of text, detailing error reports and other significant events. All lines in the commentary have following form:

    ==12345== some-message-from-Valgrind

The `12345` is the process ID. This scheme makes it easy to distinguish program output from Valgrind commentary, and also easy to differentiate commentaries from different processes which have become merged together, for whatever reason.

By default, Valgrind tools write only essential messages to the commentary, so as to avoid flooding you with information of secondary importance. If you want more information about what is happening, re-run, passing the `-v` flag to Valgrind. A second `-v` gives yet more detail.

You can direct the commentary to three different places:

1. The default: send it to a file descriptor, which is by default 2 (stderr). So, if you give the core no options, it will write commentary to the standard error stream. If you want to send it to some other file descriptor, for example number 9, you can specify `--log-fd=9`.

   This is the simplest and most common arrangement, but can cause problems when Valgrinding entire trees of processes which expect specific file descriptors, particularly stdin/stdout/stderr, to be available for their own use.

2. A less intrusive option is to write the commentary to a file, which you specify by `--log-file=filename`. There are special format specifiers that can be used to use a process ID or an environment variable name in the log file name. These are useful/necessary if your program invokes multiple processes (especially for MPI programs). See the basic options section for more details.

3. The least intrusive option is to send the commentary to a network socket. The socket is specified as an IP address and port number pair, like this: `--log-socket=192.168.0.1:12345` if you want to send the output to host IP 192.168.0.1 port 12345 (note: we have no idea if 12345 is a port of pre-existing significance). You can also omit the port number: `--log-socket=192.168.0.1`, in which case a default port of 1500 is used. This default is defined by the constant `VG_CLO_DEFAULT_LOGPORT` in the sources.

   Note, unfortunately, that you have to use an IP address here, rather than a hostname.

   Writing to a network socket is pointless if you don't have something listening at the other end. We provide a simple listener program, `valgrind-listener`, which accepts connections on the specified port and copies whatever it is sent to stdout. Probably someone will tell us this is a horrible security risk. It seems likely that people will write more sophisticated listeners in the fullness of time.

   valgrind-listener can accept simultaneous connections from up to 50 Valgrinded processes. In front of each line of output it prints the current number of active connections in round brackets.

   valgrind-listener accepts two command-line flags:

   - `-e` or `--exit-at-zero`: when the number of connected processes falls back to zero, exit. Without this, it will run forever, that is, until you send it Control-C.

   - `portnumber`: changes the port it listens on from the default (1500). The specified port must be in the range 1024 to 65535. The same restriction applies to port numbers specified by a `--log-socket` to Valgrind itself.

   If a Valgrinded process fails to connect to a listener, for whatever reason (the listener isn't running, invalid or unreachable host or port, etc), Valgrind switches back to writing the commentary to stderr. The same goes for any process which loses an established connection to a listener. In other words, killing the listener doesn't kill the processes sending data to it.

Here is an important point about the relationship between the commentary and profiling output from tools. The commentary contains a mix of messages from the Valgrind core and the selected tool. If the tool reports errors, it will report them to the commentary. However, if the tool does profiling, the profile data will be written to a file of some kind, depending on the tool, and independent of what `--log-*` options are in force. The commentary is intended to be a low-bandwidth, human-readable channel. Profiling data, on the other hand, is usually voluminous and not meaningful without further processing, which is why we have chosen this arrangement.

## 2.4. Reporting of errors

When an error-checking tool detects something bad happening in the program, an error message is written to the commentary. Here's an example from Memcheck:

    ==25832== Invalid read of size 4
    ==25832==    at 0x8048724: BandMatrix::ReSize(int, int, int) (bogon.cpp:45)
    ==25832==    by 0x80487AF: main (bogon.cpp:66)
    ==25832==  Address 0xBFFFF74C is not stack'd, malloc'd or free'd

This message says that the program did an illegal 4-byte read of address 0xBFFFF74C, which, as far as Memcheck can tell, is not a valid stack address, nor corresponds to any current malloc'd or free'd blocks. The read is happening at line 45 of `bogon.cpp`, called from line 66 of the same file, etc. For errors associated with an identified malloc'd/free'd block, for example reading free'd memory, Valgrind reports not only the location where the error happened, but also where the associated block was malloc'd/free'd.

Valgrind remembers all error reports. When an error is detected, it is compared against old reports, to see if it is a duplicate. If so, the error is noted, but no further commentary is emitted. This avoids you being swamped with bazillions of duplicate error reports.

If you want to know how many times each error occurred, run with the `-v` option. When execution finishes, all the reports are printed out, along with, and sorted by, their occurrence counts. This makes it easy to see which errors have occurred most frequently.

Errors are reported before the associated operation actually happens. If you're using a tool (eg. Memcheck) which does address checking, and your program attempts to read from address zero, the tool will emit a message to this effect, and the program will then duly die with a segmentation fault.

In general, you should try and fix errors in the order that they are reported. Not doing so can be confusing. For example, a program which copies uninitialised values to several memory locations, and later uses them, will generate several error messages, when run on Memcheck. The first such error message may well give the most direct clue to the root cause of the problem.

The process of detecting duplicate errors is quite an expensive one and can become a significant performance overhead if your program generates huge quantities of errors. To avoid serious problems, Valgrind will simply stop collecting errors after 1,000 different errors have been seen, or 10,000,000 errors in total have been seen. In this situation you might as well stop your program and fix it, because Valgrind won't tell you anything else useful after this. Note that the 1,000/10,000,000 limits apply after suppressed errors are removed. These limits are defined in `m_errormgr.c` and can be increased if necessary.

To avoid this cutoff you can use the `--error-limit=no` flag. Then Valgrind will always show errors, regardless of how many there are. Use this flag carefully, since it may have a bad effect on performance.

## 2.5. Suppressing errors

The error-checking tools detect numerous problems in the base libraries, such as the GNU C library, and the X11 client libraries, which come pre-installed on your GNU/Linux system. You can't easily fix these, but you don't want to see these errors (and yes, there are many!) So Valgrind reads a list of errors to suppress at startup. A default suppression file is created by the `./configure` script when the system is built.

You can modify and add to the suppressions file at your leisure, or, better, write your own. Multiple suppression files are allowed. This is useful if part of your project contains errors you can't or don't want to fix, yet you don't want to continuously be reminded of them.

Note: By far the easiest way to add suppressions is to use the `--gen-suppressions=yes` flag described in Command-line flags for the Valgrind core.

Each error to be suppressed is described very specifically, to minimise the possibility that a suppression-directive inadvertantly suppresses a bunch of similar errors which you did want to see. The suppression mechanism is designed to allow precise yet flexible specification of errors to suppress.

If you use the `-v` flag, at the end of execution, Valgrind prints out one line for each used suppression, giving its name and the number of times it got used. Here's the suppressions used by a run of `valgrind --tool=memcheck ls -l`:

    --27579-- supp: 1 socketcall.connect(serv_addr)/__libc_connect/__nscd_getgrgid_r
    --27579-- supp: 1 socketcall.connect(serv_addr)/__libc_connect/__nscd_getpwuid_r
    --27579-- supp: 6 strrchr/_dl_map_object_from_fd/_dl_map_object

Multiple suppressions files are allowed. By default, Valgrind uses `$PREFIX/lib/valgrind/default.supp`. You can ask to add suppressions from another file, by specifying `--suppressions=/path/to/file.supp`.

If you want to understand more about suppressions, look at an existing suppressions file whilst reading the following documentation. The file `glibc-2.3.supp`, in the source distribution, provides some good examples.

Each suppression has the following components:

- First line: its name. This merely gives a handy name to the suppression, by which it is referred to in the summary of used suppressions printed out when a program finishes. It's not important what the name is; any identifying string will do.

- Second line: name of the tool(s) that the suppression is for (if more than one, comma-separated), and the name of the suppression itself, separated by a colon (n.b.: no spaces are allowed), eg:

      tool_name1,tool_name2:suppression_name

  Recall that Valgrind is a modular system, in which different instrumentation tools can observe your program whilst it is running. Since different tools detect different kinds of errors, it is necessary to say which tool(s) the suppression is meaningful to.

  Tools will complain, at startup, if a tool does not understand any suppression directed to it. Tools ignore suppressions which are not directed to them. As a result, it is quite practical to put suppressions for all tools into the same suppression file.

- Next line: a small number of suppression types have extra information after the second line (eg. the `Param` suppression for Memcheck)

- Remaining lines: This is the calling context for the error -- the chain of function calls that led to it. There can be up to 24 of these lines.

  Locations may be either names of shared objects/executables or wildcards matching function names. They begin `obj:` and `fun:` respectively. Function and object names to match against may use the wildcard characters `*` and `?`.

  Important note: C++ function names must be mangled. If you are writing suppressions by hand, use the `--demangle=no` option to get the mangled names in your error messages.

- Finally, the entire suppression must be between curly braces. Each brace must be the first character on its own line.

A suppression only suppresses an error when the error matches all the details in the suppression. Here's an example:

    {
      __gconv_transform_ascii_internal/__mbrtowc/mbtowc
      Memcheck:Value4
      fun:__gconv_transform_ascii_internal
      fun:__mbr*toc
      fun:mbtowc
    }

What it means is: for Memcheck only, suppress a use-of-uninitialised-value error, when the data size is 4, when it occurs in the function `__gconv_transform_ascii_internal`, when that is called from any function of name matching `__mbr*toc`, when that is called from `mbtowc`. It doesn't apply under any other circumstances. The string by which this suppression is identified to the user is `__gconv_transform_ascii_internal/__mbrtowc/mbtowc`.

(See Writing suppression files for more details on the specifics of Memcheck's suppression kinds.)

Another example, again for the Memcheck tool:

    {
      libX11.so.6.2/libX11.so.6.2/libXaw.so.7.0
      Memcheck:Value4
      obj:/usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6.2
      obj:/usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6.2
      obj:/usr/X11R6/lib/libXaw.so.7.0
    }

Suppress any size 4 uninitialised-value error which occurs anywhere in `libX11.so.6.2`, when called from anywhere in the same library, when called from anywhere in `libXaw.so.7.0`. The inexact specification of locations is regrettable, but is about all you can hope for, given that the X11 libraries shipped on the Linux distro on which this example was made have had their symbol tables removed.

Although the above two examples do not make this clear, you can freely mix `obj:` and `fun:` lines in a suppression.

## 2.6. Command-line flags for the Valgrind core

As mentioned above, Valgrind's core accepts a common set of flags. The tools also accept tool-specific flags, which are documented separately for each tool.

You invoke Valgrind like this:

    valgrind [valgrind-options] your-prog [your-prog-options]

Valgrind's default settings succeed in giving reasonable behaviour in most cases. We group the available options by rough categories.

### 2.6.1. Tool-selection option

The single most important option.

- `--tool=<name>` [default=memcheck]

  Run the Valgrind tool called name, e.g. Memcheck, Cachegrind, etc.

### 2.6.2. Basic Options

These options work with all tools.

`-h --help`

  Show help for all options, both for the core and for the selected tool.

`--help-debug`

  Same as `--help`, but also lists debugging options which usually are only of use to Valgrind's developers.

`--version`

  Show the version number of the Valgrind core. Tools can have their own version numbers. There is a scheme in place to ensure that tools only execute when the core version is one they are known to work with. This was done to minimise the chances of strange problems arising from tool-vs-core version incompatibilities.

`-q --quiet`

  Run silently, and only print error messages. Useful if you are running regression tests or have some other automated test machinery.

`-v --verbose`

  Be more verbose. Gives extra information on various aspects of your program, such as: the shared objects loaded, the suppressions used, the progress of the instrumentation and execution engines, and warnings about unusual behaviour. Repeating the flag increases the verbosity level.

`-d`

  Emit information for debugging Valgrind itself. This is usually only of interest to the Valgrind developers. Repeating the flag produces more detailed output. If you want to send us a bug report, a log of the output generated by `-v -v -d -d` will make your report more useful.

`--tool=<toolname> [default: memcheck]`

  Run the Valgrind tool called `toolname`, e.g. Memcheck, Cachegrind, etc.

`--trace-children=<yes|no> [default: no]`

  When enabled, Valgrind will trace into sub-processes initiated via the `exec` system call. This can be confusing and isn't usually what you want, so it is disabled by default.

  Note that Valgrind does trace into the child of a `fork` (it would be difficult not to, since `fork` makes an identical copy of a process), so this option is arguably badly named. However, most children of `fork` calls immediately call `exec` anyway.

`--child-silent-after-fork=<yes|no> [default: no]`

  When enabled, Valgrind will not show any debugging or logging output for the child process resulting from a `fork` call. This can make the output less confusing (although more misleading) when dealing with processes that create children. It is particularly useful in conjunction with `--trace-children=`. Use of this flag is also strongly recommended if you are requesting XML output (`--xml=yes`), since otherwise the XML from child and parent may become mixed up, which usually makes it useless.

`--track-fds=<yes|no> [default: no]`

  When enabled, Valgrind will print out a list of open file descriptors on exit. Along with each file descriptor is printed a stack backtrace of where the file was opened and any details relating to the file descriptor such as the file name or socket details.

`--time-stamp=<yes|no> [default: no]`

  When enabled, each message is preceded with an indication of the elapsed wallclock time since startup, expressed as days, hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds.

`--log-fd=<number> [default: 2, stderr]`

  Specifies that Valgrind should send all of its messages to the specified file descriptor. The default, 2, is the standard error channel (stderr). Note that this may interfere with the client's own use of stderr, as Valgrind's output will be interleaved with any output that the client sends to stderr.

`--log-file=<filename>`

  Specifies that Valgrind should send all of its messages to the specified file. If the file name is empty, it causes an abort. There are three special format specifiers that can be used in the file name.

  `%p` is replaced with the current process ID. This is very useful for program that invoke multiple processes. WARNING: If you use `--trace-children=yes` and your program invokes multiple processes OR your program forks without calling exec afterwards, and you don't use this specifier (or the `%q` specifier below), the Valgrind output from all those processes will go into one file, possibly jumbled up, and possibly incomplete.

  `%q{FOO}` is replaced with the contents of the environment variable `FOO`. If the `{FOO}` part is malformed, it causes an abort. This specifier is rarely needed, but very useful in certain circumstances (eg. when running MPI programs). The idea is that you specify a variable which will be set differently for each process in the job, for example `BPROC_RANK` or whatever is applicable in your MPI setup. If the named environment variable is not set, it causes an abort. Note that in some shells, the `{` and `}` characters may need to be escaped with a backslash.

  `%%` is replaced with `%`.

  If an `%` is followed by any other character, it causes an abort.

`--log-socket=<ip-address:port-number>`

  Specifies that Valgrind should send all of its messages to the specified port at the specified IP address. The port may be omitted, in which case port 1500 is used. If a connection cannot be made to the specified socket, Valgrind falls back to writing output to the standard error (stderr). This option is intended to be used in conjunction with the `valgrind-listener` program. For further details, see the commentary in the manual.

### 2.6.3. Error-related options

These options are used by all tools that can report errors, e.g. Memcheck, but not Cachegrind.

`--xml=<yes|no> [default: no]`

  When enabled, output will be in XML format. This is aimed at making life easier for tools that consume Valgrind's output as input, such as GUI front ends. Currently this option only works with Memcheck.

`--xml-user-comment=<string>`

  Embeds an extra user comment string at the start of the XML output. Only works when `--xml=yes` is specified; ignored otherwise.

`--demangle=<yes|no> [default: yes]`

  Enable/disable automatic demangling (decoding) of C++ names. Enabled by default. When enabled, Valgrind will attempt to translate encoded C++ names back to something approaching the original. The demangler handles symbols mangled by g++ versions 2.X, 3.X and 4.X.

  An important fact about demangling is that function names mentioned in suppressions files should be in their mangled form. Valgrind does not demangle function names when searching for applicable suppressions, because to do otherwise would make suppressions file contents dependent on the state of Valgrind's demangling machinery, and would also be slow and pointless.

`--num-callers=<number> [default: 12]`

  By default, Valgrind shows twelve levels of function call names to help you identify program locations. You can change that number with this option. This can help in determining the program's location in deeply-nested call chains. Note that errors are commoned up using only the top four function locations (the place in the current function, and that of its three immediate callers). So this doesn't affect the total number of errors reported.

  The maximum value for this is 50. Note that higher settings will make Valgrind run a bit more slowly and take a bit more memory, but can be useful when working with programs with deeply-nested call chains.

`--error-limit=<yes|no> [default: yes]`

  When enabled, Valgrind stops reporting errors after 10,000,000 in total, or 1,000 different ones, have been seen. This is to stop the error tracking machinery from becoming a huge performance overhead in programs with many errors.

`--error-exitcode=<number> [default: 0]`

  Specifies an alternative exit code to return if Valgrind reported any errors in the run. When set to the default value (zero), the return value from Valgrind will always be the return value of the process being simulated. When set to a nonzero value, that value is returned instead, if Valgrind detects any errors. This is useful for using Valgrind as part of an automated test suite, since it makes it easy to detect test cases for which Valgrind has reported errors, just by inspecting return codes.

`--show-below-main=<yes|no> [default: no]`

  By default, stack traces for errors do not show any functions that appear beneath `main()` (or similar functions such as glibc's `__libc_start_main()`, if `main()` is not present in the stack trace); most of the time it's uninteresting C library stuff. If this option is enabled, those entries below `main()` will be shown.

`--suppressions=<filename> [default: $PREFIX/lib/valgrind/default.supp]`

  Specifies an extra file from which to read descriptions of errors to suppress. You may use up to 100 extra suppression files.

`--gen-suppressions=<yes|no|all> [default: no]`

  When set to `yes`, Valgrind will pause after every error shown and print the line:

  ---- Print suppression ? --- [Return/N/n/Y/y/C/c] ----

  The prompt's behaviour is the same as for the `--db-attach` option (see below).

  If you choose to, Valgrind will print out a suppression for this error. You can then cut and paste it into a suppression file if you don't want to hear about the error in the future.

  When set to `all`, Valgrind will print a suppression for every reported error, without querying the user.

  This option is particularly useful with C++ programs, as it prints out the suppressions with mangled names, as required.

  Note that the suppressions printed are as specific as possible. You may want to common up similar ones, eg. by adding wildcards to function names. Sometimes two different errors are suppressed by the same suppression, in which case Valgrind will output the suppression more than once, but you only need to have one copy in your suppression file (but having more than one won't cause problems). Also, the suppression name is given as `<insert a suppression name here>`; the name doesn't really matter, it's only used with the `-v` option which prints out all used suppression records.

`--db-attach=<yes|no> [default: no]`

  When enabled, Valgrind will pause after every error shown and print the line:

  ---- Attach to debugger ? --- [Return/N/n/Y/y/C/c] ----

  Pressing `Ret`, or `N Ret` or `n Ret`, causes Valgrind not to start a debugger for this error.

  Pressing `Y Ret` or `y Ret` causes Valgrind to start a debugger for the program at this point. When you have finished with the debugger, quit from it, and the program will continue. Trying to continue from inside the debugger doesn't work.

  `C Ret` or `c Ret` causes Valgrind not to start a debugger, and not to ask again.

  Note: `--db-attach=yes` conflicts with `--trace-children=yes`. You can't use them together. Valgrind refuses to start up in this situation.

  May 2002: this is a historical relic which could be easily fixed if it gets in your way. Mail us and complain if this is a problem for you.

  Nov 2002: if you're sending output to a logfile or to a network socket, I guess this option doesn't make any sense. Caveat emptor.

`--db-command=<command> [default: gdb -nw %f %p]`

  Specify the debugger to use with the `--db-attach` command. The default debugger is gdb. This option is a template that is expanded by Valgrind at runtime. `%f` is replaced with the executable's file name and `%p` is replaced by the process ID of the executable.

  This specifies how Valgrind will invoke the debugger. By default it will use whatever GDB is detected at build time, which is usually `/usr/bin/gdb`. Using this command, you can specify some alternative command to invoke the debugger you want to use.

  The command string given can include one or instances of the `%p` and `%f` expansions. Each instance of `%p` expands to the PID of the process to be debugged and each instance of `%f` expands to the path to the executable for the process to be debugged.

  Since `<command>` is likely to contain spaces, you will need to put this entire flag in quotes to ensure it is correctly handled by the shell.

`--input-fd=<number> [default: 0, stdin]`

  When using `--db-attach=yes` or `--gen-suppressions=yes`, Valgrind will stop so as to read keyboard input from you when each error occurs. By default it reads from the standard input (stdin), which is problematic for programs which close stdin. This option allows you to specify an alternative file descriptor from which to read input.

`--max-stackframe=<number> [default: 2000000]`

  The maximum size of a stack frame. If the stack pointer moves by more than this amount then Valgrind will assume that the program is switching to a different stack.

  You may need to use this option if your program has large stack-allocated arrays. Valgrind keeps track of your program's stack pointer. If it changes by more than the threshold amount, Valgrind assumes your program is switching to a different stack, and Memcheck behaves differently than it would for a stack pointer change smaller than the threshold. Usually this heuristic works well. However, if your program allocates large structures on the stack, this heuristic will be fooled, and Memcheck will subsequently report large numbers of invalid stack accesses. This option allows you to change the threshold to a different value.

  You should only consider use of this flag if Valgrind's debug output directs you to do so. In that case it will tell you the new threshold you should specify.

  In general, allocating large structures on the stack is a bad idea, because you can easily run out of stack space, especially on systems with limited memory or which expect to support large numbers of threads each with a small stack, and also because the error checking performed by Memcheck is more effective for heap-allocated data than for stack-allocated data. If you have to use this flag, you may wish to consider rewriting your code to allocate on the heap rather than on the stack.

### 2.6.4. `malloc()`-related Options

For tools that use their own version of `malloc()` (e.g. Memcheck and Massif), the following options apply.

`--alignment=<number> [default: 8]`

  By default Valgrind's `malloc()`, `realloc()`, etc, return 8-byte aligned addresses. This is standard for most processors. However, some programs might assume that `malloc()` et al return 16-byte or more aligned memory. The supplied value must be between 8 and 4096 inclusive, and must be a power of two.

### 2.6.5. Uncommon Options

These options apply to all tools, as they affect certain obscure workings of the Valgrind core. Most people won't need to use these.

`--run-libc-freeres=<yes|no> [default: yes]`

  The GNU C library (`libc.so`), which is used by all programs, may allocate memory for its own uses. Usually it doesn't bother to free that memory when the program ends—there would be no point, since the Linux kernel reclaims all process resources when a process exits anyway, so it would just slow things down.

  The glibc authors realised that this behaviour causes leak checkers, such as Valgrind, to falsely report leaks in glibc, when a leak check is done at exit. In order to avoid this, they provided a routine called `__libc_freeres` specifically to make glibc release all memory it has allocated. Memcheck therefore tries to run `__libc_freeres` at exit.

  Unfortunately, in some very old versions of glibc, `__libc_freeres` is sufficiently buggy to cause segmentation faults. This was particularly noticeable on Red Hat 7.1. So this flag is provided in order to inhibit the run of `__libc_freeres`. If your program seems to run fine on Valgrind, but segfaults at exit, you may find that `--run-libc-freeres=no` fixes that, although at the cost of possibly falsely reporting space leaks in `libc.so`.

`--sim-hints=hint1,hint2,...`

  Pass miscellaneous hints to Valgrind which slightly modify the simulated behaviour in nonstandard or dangerous ways, possibly to help the simulation of strange features. By default no hints are enabled. Use with caution! Currently known hints are:

  - `lax-ioctls:` Be very lax about ioctl handling; the only assumption is that the size is correct. Doesn't require the full buffer to be initialized when writing. Without this, using some device drivers with a large number of strange ioctl commands becomes very tiresome.

  - `enable-inner:` Enable some special magic needed when the program being run is itself Valgrind.

`--kernel-variant=variant1,variant2,...`

  Handle system calls and ioctls arising from minor variants of the default kernel for this platform. This is useful for running on hacked kernels or with kernel modules which support nonstandard ioctls, for example. Use with caution. If you don't understand what this option does then you almost certainly don't need it. Currently known variants are:

  - `bproc:` Support the sys_broc system call on x86. This is for running on BProc, which is a minor variant of standard Linux which is sometimes used for building clusters.

`--show-emwarns=<yes|no> [default: no]`

  When enabled, Valgrind will emit warnings about its CPU emulation in certain cases. These are usually not interesting.

`--smc-check=<none|stack|all> [default: stack]`

  This option controls Valgrind's detection of self-modifying code. Valgrind can do no detection, detect self-modifying code on the stack, or detect self-modifying code anywhere. Note that the default option will catch the vast majority of cases, as far as we know. Running with `all` will slow Valgrind down greatly. Running with `none` will rarely speed things up, since very little code gets put on the stack for most programs.

  Some architectures (including ppc32 and ppc64) require programs which create code at runtime to flush the instruction cache in between code generation and first use. Valgrind observes and honours such instructions. Hence, on ppc32/Linux and ppc64/Linux, Valgrind always provides complete, transparent support for self-modifying code. It is only on x86/Linux and amd64/Linux that you need to use this flag.

### 2.6.6. Debugging Valgrind Options

There are also some options for debugging Valgrind itself. You shouldn't need to use them in the normal run of things. If you wish to see the list, use the `--help-debug` option.

### 2.6.7. Setting default Options

Note that Valgrind also reads options from three places:

1. The file `~/.valgrindrc`

2. The environment variable `$VALGRIND_OPTS`

3. The file `./.valgrindrc`

These are processed in the given order, before the command-line options. Options processed later override those processed earlier; for example, options in `./.valgrindrc` will take precedence over those in `~/.valgrindrc`. The first two are particularly useful for setting the default tool to use.

Any tool-specific options put in `$VALGRIND_OPTS` or the `.valgrindrc` files should be prefixed with the tool name and a colon. For example, if you want Memcheck to always do leak checking, you can put the following entry in `~/.valgrindrc`:

    --memcheck:leak-check=yes

This will be ignored if any tool other than Memcheck is run. Without the `memcheck:` part, this will cause problems if you select other tools that don't understand `--leak-check=yes`.

## 2.7. Support for Threads

Valgrind supports programs which use POSIX pthreads. Getting this to work was technically challenging but it now works well enough for significant threaded applications to run.

The main thing to point out is that although Valgrind works with the standard Linux threads library (eg. NPTL or LinuxThreads), it serialises execution so that only one thread is running at a time. This approach avoids the horrible implementation problems of implementing a truly multiprocessor version of Valgrind, but it does mean that threaded apps run only on one CPU, even if you have a multiprocessor machine.

Valgrind schedules your program's threads in a round-robin fashion, with all threads having equal priority. It switches threads every 100000 basic blocks (on x86, typically around 600000 instructions), which means you'll get a much finer interleaving of thread executions than when run natively. This in itself may cause your program to behave differently if you have some kind of concurrency, critical race, locking, or similar, bugs. In that case you might consider using Valgrind's Helgrind tool to track them down.

Your program will use the native `libpthread`, but not all of its facilities will work. In particular, synchronisation of processes via shared-memory segments will not work. This relies on special atomic instruction sequences which Valgrind does not emulate in a way which works between processes. Unfortunately there's no way for Valgrind to warn when this is happening, and such calls will mostly work. Only when there's a race will it fail.

Valgrind also supports direct use of the `clone()` system call, `futex()` and so on. `clone()` is supported where either everything is shared (a thread) or nothing is shared (fork-like); partial sharing will fail. Again, any use of atomic instruction sequences in shared memory between processes will not work reliably.

## 2.8. Handling of Signals

Valgrind has a fairly complete signal implementation. It should be able to cope with any POSIX-compliant use of signals.

If you're using signals in clever ways (for example, catching SIGSEGV, modifying page state and restarting the instruction), you're probably relying on precise exceptions. In this case, you will need to use `--vex-iropt-precise-memory-exns=yes`.

If your program dies as a result of a fatal core-dumping signal, Valgrind will generate its own core file (`vgcore.NNNNN`) containing your program's state. You may use this core file for post-mortem debugging with gdb or similar. (Note: it will not generate a core if your core dump size limit is 0.) At the time of writing the core dumps do not include all the floating point register information.

In the unlikely event that Valgrind itself crashes, the operating system will create a core dump in the usual way.

## 2.9. Building and Installing Valgrind

We use the standard Unix `./configure`, `make`, `make install` mechanism, and we have attempted to ensure that it works on machines with kernel 2.4 or 2.6 and glibc 2.2.X to 2.5.X. Once you have completed `make install` you may then want to run the regression tests with `make regtest`.

There are five options (in addition to the usual `--prefix=` which affect how Valgrind is built:

- `--enable-inner`

  This builds Valgrind with some special magic hacks which make it possible to run it on a standard build of Valgrind (what the developers call "self-hosting"). Ordinarily you should not use this flag as various kinds of safety checks are disabled.

- `--enable-tls`

  TLS (Thread Local Storage) is a relatively new mechanism which requires compiler, linker and kernel support. Valgrind tries to automatically test if TLS is supported and if so enables this option. Sometimes it cannot test for TLS, so this option allows you to override the automatic test.

- `--with-vex=`

  Specifies the path to the underlying VEX dynamic-translation library. By default this is taken to be in the VEX directory off the root of the source tree.

- `--enable-only64bit`

  `--enable-only32bit`

  On 64-bit platforms (amd64-linux, ppc64-linux), Valgrind is by default built in such a way that both 32-bit and 64-bit executables can be run. Sometimes this cleverness is a problem for a variety of reasons. These two flags allow for single-target builds in this situation. If you issue both, the configure script will complain. Note they are ignored on 32-bit-only platforms (x86-linux, ppc32-linux).

The `configure` script tests the version of the X server currently indicated by the current `$DISPLAY`. This is a known bug. The intention was to detect the version of the current X client libraries, so that correct suppressions could be selected for them, but instead the test checks the server version. This is just plain wrong.

If you are building a binary package of Valgrind for distribution, please read `README_PACKAGERS` Readme Packagers. It contains some important information.

Apart from that, there's not much excitement here. Let us know if you have build problems.

## 2.10. If You Have Problems

Contact us at http://www.valgrind.org/.

See Limitations for the known limitations of Valgrind, and for a list of programs which are known not to work on it.

All parts of the system make heavy use of assertions and internal self-checks. They are permanently enabled, and we have no plans to disable them. If one of them breaks, please mail us!

If you get an assertion failure in `m_mallocfree.c`, this may have happened because your program wrote off the end of a malloc'd block, or before its beginning. Valgrind hopefully will have emitted a proper message to that effect before dying in this way. This is a known problem which we should fix.

Read the Valgrind FAQ for more advice about common problems, crashes, etc.

## 2.11. Limitations

The following list of limitations seems long. However, most programs actually work fine.

Valgrind will run Linux ELF binaries, on a kernel 2.4.X or 2.6.X system, on the x86, amd64, ppc32 and ppc64 architectures, subject to the following constraints:

- On x86 and amd64, there is no support for 3DNow! instructions. If the translator encounters these, Valgrind will generate a SIGILL when the instruction is executed. Apart from that, on x86 and amd64, essentially all instructions are supported, up to and including SSE3.

  On ppc32 and ppc64, almost all integer, floating point and Altivec instructions are supported. Specifically: integer and FP insns that are mandatory for PowerPC, the "General-purpose optional" group (fsqrt, fsqrts, stfiwx), the "Graphics optional" group (fre, fres, frsqrte, frsqrtes), and the Altivec (also known as VMX) SIMD instruction set, are supported.

- Atomic instruction sequences are not properly supported, in the sense that their atomicity is not preserved. This will affect any use of synchronization via memory shared between processes. They will appear to work, but fail sporadically.

- If your program does its own memory management, rather than using malloc/new/free/delete, it should still work, but Memcheck's error checking won't be so effective. If you describe your program's memory management scheme using "client requests" (see The Client Request mechanism), Memcheck can do better. Nevertheless, using malloc/new and free/delete is still the best approach.

- Valgrind's signal simulation is not as robust as it could be. Basic POSIX-compliant sigaction and sigprocmask functionality is supplied, but it's conceivable that things could go badly awry if you do weird things with signals. Workaround: don't. Programs that do non-POSIX signal tricks are in any case inherently unportable, so should be avoided if possible.

- Machine instructions, and system calls, have been implemented on demand. So it's possible, although unlikely, that a program will fall over with a message to that effect. If this happens, please report all the details printed out, so we can try and implement the missing feature.

- Memory consumption of your program is majorly increased whilst running under Valgrind. This is due to the large amount of administrative information maintained behind the scenes. Another cause is that Valgrind dynamically translates the original executable. Translated, instrumented code is 12-18 times larger than the original so you can easily end up with 50+ MB of translations when running (eg) a web browser.

- Valgrind can handle dynamically-generated code just fine. If you regenerate code over the top of old code (ie. at the same memory addresses), if the code is on the stack Valgrind will realise the code has changed, and work correctly. This is necessary to handle the trampolines GCC uses to implemented nested functions. If you regenerate code somewhere other than the stack, you will need to use the `--smc-check=all` flag, and Valgrind will run more slowly than normal.

- As of version 3.0.0, Valgrind has the following limitations in its implementation of x86/AMD64 floating point relative to IEEE754.

  Precision: There is no support for 80 bit arithmetic. Internally, Valgrind represents all such "long double" numbers in 64 bits, and so there may be some differences in results. Whether or not this is critical remains to be seen. Note, the x86/amd64 fldt/fstpt instructions (read/write 80-bit numbers) are correctly simulated, using conversions to/from 64 bits, so that in-memory images of 80-bit numbers look correct if anyone wants to see.

  The impression observed from many FP regression tests is that the accuracy differences aren't significant. Generally speaking, if a program relies on 80-bit precision, there may be difficulties porting it to non x86/amd64 platforms which only support 64-bit FP precision. Even on x86/amd64, the program may get different results depending on whether it is compiled to use SSE2 instructions (64-bits only), or x87 instructions (80-bit). The net effect is to make FP programs behave as if they had been run on a machine with 64-bit IEEE floats, for example PowerPC. On amd64 FP arithmetic is done by default on SSE2, so amd64 looks more like PowerPC than x86 from an FP perspective, and there are far fewer noticeable accuracy differences than with x86.

  Rounding: Valgrind does observe the 4 IEEE-mandated rounding modes (to nearest, to +infinity, to -infinity, to zero) for the following conversions: float to integer, integer to float where there is a possibility of loss of precision, and float-to-float rounding. For all other FP operations, only the IEEE default mode (round to nearest) is supported.

  Numeric exceptions in FP code: IEEE754 defines five types of numeric exception that can happen: invalid operation (sqrt of negative number, etc), division by zero, overflow, underflow, inexact (loss of precision).

  For each exception, two courses of action are defined by IEEE754: either (1) a user-defined exception handler may be called, or (2) a default action is defined, which "fixes things up" and allows the computation to proceed without throwing an exception.

  Currently Valgrind only supports the default fixup actions. Again, feedback on the importance of exception support would be appreciated.

  When Valgrind detects that the program is trying to exceed any of these limitations (setting exception handlers, rounding mode, or precision control), it can print a message giving a traceback of where this has happened, and continue execution. This behaviour used to be the default, but the messages are annoying and so showing them is now disabled by default. Use `--show-emwarns=yes` to see them.

  The above limitations define precisely the IEEE754 'default' behaviour: default fixup on all exceptions, round-to-nearest operations, and 64-bit precision.

- As of version 3.0.0, Valgrind has the following limitations in its implementation of x86/AMD64 SSE2 FP arithmetic, relative to IEEE754.

  Essentially the same: no exceptions, and limited observance of rounding mode. Also, SSE2 has control bits which make it treat denormalised numbers as zero (DAZ) and a related action, flush denormals to zero (FTZ). Both of these cause SSE2 arithmetic to be less accurate than IEEE requires. Valgrind detects, ignores, and can warn about, attempts to enable either mode.

- As of version 3.2.0, Valgrind has the following limitations in its implementation of PPC32 and PPC64 floating point arithmetic, relative to IEEE754.

  Scalar (non-Altivec): Valgrind provides a bit-exact emulation of all floating point instructions, except for "fre" and "fres", which are done more precisely than required by the PowerPC architecture specification. All floating point operations observe the current rounding mode.

  However, fpscr[FPRF] is not set after each operation. That could be done but would give measurable performance overheads, and so far no need for it has been found.

  As on x86/AMD64, IEEE754 exceptions are not supported: all floating point exceptions are handled using the default IEEE fixup actions. Valgrind detects, ignores, and can warn about, attempts to unmask the 5 IEEE FP exception kinds by writing to the floating-point status and control register (fpscr).

  Vector (Altivec, VMX): essentially as with x86/AMD64 SSE/SSE2: no exceptions, and limited observance of rounding mode. For Altivec, FP arithmetic is done in IEEE/Java mode, which is more accurate than the Linux default setting. "More accurate" means that denormals are handled properly, rather than simply being flushed to zero.

Programs which are known not to work are:

- emacs starts up but immediately concludes it is out of memory and aborts. It may be that Memcheck does not provide a good enough emulation of the `mallinfo` function. Emacs works fine if you build it to use the standard malloc/free routines.

## 2.12. An Example Run

This is the log for a run of a small program using Memcheck. The program is in fact correct, and the reported error is as the result of a potentially serious code generation bug in GNU g++ (snapshot 20010527).

    sewardj@phoenix:~/newmat10$ ~/Valgrind-6/valgrind -v ./bogon
    ==25832== Valgrind 0.10, a memory error detector for x86 RedHat 7.1.
    ==25832== Copyright (C) 2000-2001, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward.
    ==25832== Startup, with flags:
    ==25832== --suppressions=/home/sewardj/Valgrind/redhat71.supp
    ==25832== reading syms from /lib/ld-linux.so.2
    ==25832== reading syms from /lib/libc.so.6
    ==25832== reading syms from /mnt/pima/jrs/Inst/lib/libgcc_s.so.0
    ==25832== reading syms from /lib/libm.so.6
    ==25832== reading syms from /mnt/pima/jrs/Inst/lib/libstdc++.so.3
    ==25832== reading syms from /home/sewardj/Valgrind/valgrind.so
    ==25832== reading syms from /proc/self/exe
    ==25832==
    ==25832== Invalid read of size 4
    ==25832==    at 0x8048724: BandMatrix::ReSize(int,int,int) (bogon.cpp:45)
    ==25832==    by 0x80487AF: main (bogon.cpp:66)
    ==25832==  Address 0xBFFFF74C is not stack'd, malloc'd or free'd
    ==25832==
    ==25832== ERROR SUMMARY: 1 errors from 1 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)
    ==25832== malloc/free: in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
    ==25832== malloc/free: 0 allocs, 0 frees, 0 bytes allocated.
    ==25832== For a detailed leak analysis, rerun with: --leak-check=yes

The GCC folks fixed this about a week before gcc-3.0 shipped.

## 2.13. Warning Messages You Might See

Most of these only appear if you run in verbose mode (enabled by `-v`):

- `More than 100 errors detected. Subsequent errors will still be recorded, but in less detail than before.`

  After 100 different errors have been shown, Valgrind becomes more conservative about collecting them. It then requires only the program counters in the top two stack frames to match when deciding whether or not two errors are really the same one. Prior to this point, the PCs in the top four frames are required to match. This hack has the effect of slowing down the appearance of new errors after the first 100. The 100 constant can be changed by recompiling Valgrind.

- `More than 1000 errors detected. I'm not reporting any more. Final error counts may be inaccurate. Go fix your program!`

  After 1000 different errors have been detected, Valgrind ignores any more. It seems unlikely that collecting even more different ones would be of practical help to anybody, and it avoids the danger that Valgrind spends more and more of its time comparing new errors against an ever-growing collection. As above, the 1000 number is a compile-time constant.

- `Warning: client switching stacks?`

  Valgrind spotted such a large change in the stack pointer that it guesses the client is switching to a different stack. At this point it makes a kludgey guess where the base of the new stack is, and sets memory permissions accordingly. You may get many bogus error messages following this, if Valgrind guesses wrong. At the moment "large change" is defined as a change of more that 2000000 in the value of the stack pointer register.

- `Warning: client attempted to close Valgrind's logfile fd <number>`

  Valgrind doesn't allow the client to close the logfile, because you'd never see any diagnostic information after that point. If you see this message, you may want to use the `--log-fd=<number>` option to specify a different logfile file-descriptor number.

- `Warning: noted but unhandled ioctl <number>`

  Valgrind observed a call to one of the vast family of `ioctl` system calls, but did not modify its memory status info (because nobody has yet written a suitable wrapper). The call will still have gone through, but you may get spurious errors after this as a result of the non-update of the memory info.

- `Warning: set address range perms: large range <number>`

  Diagnostic message, mostly for benefit of the Valgrind developers, to do with memory permissions.