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Diffstat (limited to 'README')
| -rw-r--r-- | README | 33 |
1 files changed, 18 insertions, 15 deletions
@@ -21,23 +21,26 @@ hours of frustrating bug-hunting, making your programs more stable. You can also perform detailed profiling, to speed up and reduce memory use of your programs. -The Valgrind distribution currently includes five tools: two memory error -detectors, a thread error detector, a cache profiler and a heap profiler. +The Valgrind distribution currently includes four tools: a memory error +detector, a thread error detector, a cache profiler and a heap profiler. To give you an idea of what Valgrind tools do, when a program is run -under the supervision of the first memory error detector tool, all reads -and writes of memory are checked, and calls to malloc/new/free/delete -are intercepted. As a result, it can detect problems such as: - - Use of uninitialised memory - Reading/writing memory after it has been free'd - Reading/writing off the end of malloc'd blocks - Reading/writing inappropriate areas on the stack - Memory leaks -- where pointers to malloc'd blocks are lost forever - Passing of uninitialised and/or unaddressible memory to system calls - Mismatched use of malloc/new/new [] vs free/delete/delete [] - Overlaps of arguments to strcpy() and related functions - Some abuses of the POSIX pthread API +under the supervision of Memcheck, the memory error detector tool, all +reads and writes of memory are checked, and calls to malloc/new/free/delete +are intercepted. As a result, Memcheck can detect if your program: + + - Accesses memory it shouldn't (areas not yet allocated, areas that have + been freed, areas past the end of heap blocks, inaccessible areas of + the stack). + + - Uses uninitialised values in dangerous ways. + + - Leaks memory. + + - Does bad frees of heap blocks (double frees, mismatched frees). + + - Passes overlapping source and destination memory blocks to memcpy() and + related functions. Problems like these can be difficult to find by other means, often lying undetected for long periods, then causing occasional, |