1
2Greetings, packaging person!  This information is aimed at people
3building binary distributions of Valgrind.
4
5Thanks for taking the time and effort to make a binary distribution of
6Valgrind.  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
94If you find any more hints/tips for packaging, please report
95it as a bugreport. See http://www.valgrind.org for details.
96