Valgrind

Valgrind: Dynamic Analysis Tool

Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools. It can detect memory management and threading bugs, and profile programs. Valgrind helps programmers improve code quality by detecting reading/writing of uninitialized memory, memory leaks, and more.

What is Valgrind?

Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools used to debug and profile Linux executables. It runs programs on a virtual machine and instruments the code at execution time to detect illegal memory accesses, use of uninitialized memory, memory leaks, and threading bugs and race conditions.

Some of the key features of Valgrind include:

• Memory error detector - Identifies reads and writes to illegal memory addresses
• Memory leak detector - Detects memory blocks that are allocated but never freed
• Thread error detector - Finds synchronization errors and data races in threaded programs
• Call-graph generator - Creates a control flow graph and call graph for a program
• Cache and branch-prediction profiler - Profiles cache misses and branch mispredictions

Valgrind tools like Memcheck, Cachegrind, Helgrind, and Massif are implemented on top of the Valgrind core. These tools perform detailed debugging and profiling to help optimize programs for space, time and parallelism efficiency. The key advantage of using Valgrind is that it works directly on unmodified executables without needing recompilation or source code access.

Valgrind runs on Linux on x86, AMD64, ARM, PowerPC and other CPU architectures. It is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Valgrind Features

Official Links