Variants and Patches

Several other Valgrind tools have been created. Some of these can plug directly into an existing Valgrind installation, but some require downloading a whole Valgrind distribution which contains a specially modified core. Please note that some of these are experimental, and may not work 100%.

Nick Nethercote has built several experimental tools: a Bounds Checker, a Signal-Handler Checker, and a Data Flow Tracer. He also has an experimental Valgrind distribution that has an interactive command line.

Jeremy Fitzhardinge has several patches, mostly to do with threading. His patches are regularly merged with the CVS head; this set represents the currently unmerged patches.

Robert Walsh has some useful patches: one adds watchpoints on memory locations, the other adds support for pool-based allocators (which has been merged into Valgrind proper).

François Févotte and Bruno Lathuilière have written verrou: (amd64 only) a floating-point rounding errors checker that performs statistical analysis on perturbed rounding.

The latest documementation.

The main references about verrou are:

François Févotte and Bruno Lathuilière. Debugging and optimization of HPC programs with the Verrou tool. In International Workshop on Software Correctness for HPC Applications (Correctness), Denver, CO, USA, Nov. 2019. DOI: 10.1109/Correctness49594.2019.00006

François Févotte and Bruno Lathuilière. Studying the numerical quality of an industrial computing code: A case study on code_aster. In 10th International Workshop on Numerical Software Verification (NSV), pages 61--80, Heidelberg, Germany, July 2017. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-63501-9_5

François Févotte and Bruno Lathuilière. VERROU: a CESTAC evaluation without recompilation. In International Symposium on Scientific Computing, Computer Arithmetics and Verified Numerics (SCAN), Uppsala, Sweden, September 2016.

Devan Sohier, Pablo De Oliveira Castro, François Févotte, Bruno Lathuilière, Eric Petit, and Olivier Jamond. Confidence intervals for stochastic arithmetic. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 47(2), 2021. This contains more information about the required number of samples (not specific to verrou).

Adam Gundy <arg at cyberscience com> supplied a variant of the 20031012 stable release that is capable of running Wine on Valgrind. A big thanks to him.

Wine: valgrind 20031012-wine (tar.bz2) [697Kb] - Oct 12 2003
md5: ebe1641b4873ec30dd013b6b618f5f90

This is a variant of the 20031012 stable release. It makes it possible to run Wine on Valgrind, and so to debug Windows applications with Valgrind. See README_WINE_FOLKS in the tarball for details.

Note: only use this -wine variant if you want to valgrindify Wine and apps running on it. For "normal" Linux applications, use the standard valgrind version.

Valgrind 20031012-wine should be used with a recent CVS version of Wine. Provided you have the PDB files for executables and DLLs, valgrind will give stack traces for MSVC compiled code. Multi-threaded programs are fully supported. Leak checking does not work at the moment.

Vince Weaver has written three tools: a cache tool trace generator, a SimPoint data generator (which has been merged into the Valgrind distribution as the BBV tool as part of release 3.5.0), and a TAXI-compatible stream generator (TAXI decodes pre-decoded x86 instruction streams into PISA uops and runs through a modified version of the PISA SimpleScalar).

Michael Meeks has written Iogrind, a prototype I/O profiling tool.

Konstantin Serebryany and Timur Iskhodzhanov have written ThreadSanitizer, a data race detector. It has some similarities to Helgrind and DRD but also some differences.