Работа с dmalloc

Russian · English

Меню:

• Main
• Functional programming
• Clojure
• Emacs
• Information Security
• C++
• Open Source Projects
• Articles

Introduction

Dmalloc — is a library for detecting problems during work with memory — memory leaks, accessing behind memory blocks boundaries (same as in Electric Fence), and also collecting statistic about memory consumption and allocation. This library redefines standard functions for work with memory (malloc, free, etc.). Library is written in portable style, and can be used on Linux, Solaris and other Unix-like operating systems, including MS Windows (under Cygwin)¹.

From my point of view, now there are more powerful alternatives to dmalloc — Valgrind and Google Performance Tools.

Installation

As for many Unix packages, installation of dmalloc pretty simple — you need to download source code, unpack it and run 3 commands²:

./configure
make
make install

If you will use dmalloc to analyse multi-threaded programs, then you need to run configure script with --enable-threads option.

Work with dmalloc

As for many other libraries, that implements memory errors detection, usage of dmalloc is very simple — you need to link the library with program, or load it with LD_PRELOAD³. I need to mention, that exist two versions of library: for programs, that written in C language — libdmalloc, and for programs in C++ — libdmallocthcxx.⁴ Second library, besides support for standard memory functions, like malloc & free, also supports C++ memory operators — new, new [], etc.

libdmalloc gets information about settings from environment variables. Some difference from other libraries is that with library come command-line utility called dmalloc, that could be used to set environment variables without their explicit naming and not depending on syntax of concrete command processor⁵. In typical situation, dmalloc is used as in following example:

eval `dmalloc -b options debug_level`
LD_PRELOAD=libmalloc.so.4 ./your-program

we need to use eval command, as if we simply run dmalloc, then it just print commands to set value to environment variable DMALLOC_OPTIONS, but not set this value⁶. Depending on command processor, you need to pass dmalloc concrete option: -b for shells compatible with sh — bash, zsh, etc., and -c for shells, that use csh-compatible syntax.

User also should to pass value, that defines which checks will be used (debug level). There are several predefined values (low, runtime, medium & high), that enable some predefined sets of checks (from minimal to maximal). User can also specify they own set of checks, using -d option for dmalloc utility to specify number, that describe set of checks. There is also -p option, that allow to specify checks using mnemonic names, for example:

eval `dmalloc -d 0 -l log_file -p log-non-free -p check-fence -p check-funcs`

In this example, -d option used to set all flags to 0, and after this, use -p options to form new set of checks⁷. Full list of checks, available for user, we can obtain by using dmalloc with -DV option (this will print names of checks, their short descriptions, and corresponding numbers).

Among other dmalloc options, mostly used is -l (or --logfile) option, that allow to specify name of log file.

Analysis of results

After finish of analyzed program, we find report about all found errors in corresponding log file. In example below, program had tried to free block of memory, that was already freed by other function, and this lead to following report⁸:

..... description of parameters, passed to libdmalloc
1204541422: 3: ERROR: free: cannot locate pointer in heap (err 22)
1204541422: 3:   error details: finding address in heap
1204541422: 3:   pointer '0xb7fc8ff0' from 'test-double-free.c:7' prev access 'unknown'

If in program there are errors, that lead to memory leaks, then we'll see something like:

1204542221: 3: Dumping Not-Freed Pointers Changed Since Start:
1204542221: 3:  not freed: '0xb7fdffc8|s1' (10 bytes) from 'test-memleak.c:6'
1204542221: 3:  total-size  count  source
1204542221: 3:          10      1  test-memleak.c:6
1204542221: 3:          10      1  Total of 1

Besides printing messages about found errors, libdmalloc also print some statistic about memory allocation, numbers of calls for concrete functions, etc. For example:

1204542469: 3: Dumping Chunk Statistics:
1204542469: 3: basic-block 4096 bytes, alignment 8 bytes
1204542469: 3: heap address range: 0xb7f01000 to 0xb7f0a000, 36864 bytes
1204542469: 3:     user blocks: 1 blocks, 4074 bytes (11%)
1204542469: 3:    admin blocks: 8 blocks, 32768 bytes (89%)
1204542469: 3:    total blocks: 9 blocks, 36864 bytes
1204542469: 3: heap checked 0
1204542469: 3: alloc calls: malloc 2, calloc 0, realloc 0, free 1
1204542469: 3: alloc calls: recalloc 0, memalign 0, valloc 0
1204542469: 3: alloc calls: new 0, delete 0
1204542469: 3:   current memory in use: 10 bytes (1 pnts)
1204542469: 3:  total memory allocated: 20 bytes (2 pnts)
1204542469: 3:  max in use at one time: 10 bytes (1 pnts)
1204542469: 3: max alloced with 1 call: 10 bytes
1204542469: 3: max unused memory space: 22 bytes (68%)
1204542469: 3: top 10 allocations:
1204542469: 3:  total-size  count in-use-size  count  source
1204542469: 3:          10      1          10      1  test-memleak.c:6
1204542469: 3:          10      1           0      0  test-memleak.c:4
1204542469: 3:          20      2          10      1  Total of 2

1. Library could be also used for analyse multi-threaded programs.

2. In many operating systems, this package available to installation with package managers.

3. To get detailed information about source code and lines of code, that produce error, you can recompile your program with inclusion of dmalloc.h header file. You can read about this in documentation.

4. Libraries, that should be used to check multi-threaded programs has th suffix. For example: libdmallocth.so.4

5. User can also specify options, that will used on every run of dmalloc. To specify these options the file ~/.dmallocrc is used.

6. Documentation has several examples of shell functions, that will eliminate usage of <code>eval.

7. We need to mention, that in sequential calls of dmalloc values, that are not changed by current call, will preserve their values. User can use -r option to specify, that all option should be erased, or -k option to specify, that values should be preserved.

8. In this example, test program was compiled with header file dmalloc.h, and library has access to information about source code. If you can't rebuild program, than you can get information about source code with gdb, as this described in documenation.

Copyright © 1997-2011Alex Ott · Design by Andreas Viklund ·