Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Valgrind 3.3.0 has been released

Vagrind 3.3.0 has been released. We use it extensively for Sage development and debugging and have been using 3.3.0svn for quite a while because of its increased performance as well for the much better SSE2 and SSE3 support. Among the new experimental tools are DRD and omega. In addition massif has been rewritten and hellgrind has been substantially updated. While I haven't used DRD yet, omega has turned out to be great help in tracking down memory leaks in the sparse linear algebra code of Sage. Memcheck did find those leaks, but didn't point to the location where memory was leaked, but to the location where the leaked memory was allocated. Omega is somewhat slower than memcheck (in the concrete examples I looked at by a factor of 20, on top of the 30 time slowdown of memcheck), but it is well worth the wait. Just make sure to compile your code with "-O0" for omega for optimal results.

An updated optional valgrind.spkg should be available soon.

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