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91 lines
3.4 KiB
HTML
91 lines
3.4 KiB
HTML
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
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<html>
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<head>
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.5 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.36 i686) [Netscape]">
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</head>
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<body>
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<h2>
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About Leaky</h2>
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Leaky is a program which will help you find memory leaks, and as of late,
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help you debug reference count problems with xpcom objects.
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<p>To use leaky you must first build it. I've made it work only on x86
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linux. To work on other platforms you will need to:
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<ol>
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<li>
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Implement CrawlStack in libmalloc.cpp</li>
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<li>
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Implement DumpAddressMap in libmalloc.cpp and in ShowLibs.cpp</li>
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<li>
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Either support LD_PRELOAD in your dynamic linker *or* produce a library
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that wraps your libc malloc (see config.h for some clues)</li>
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<li>
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Implement symbol table reading code (see coff.cpp, elf.cpp and bfd.cpp
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for examples; at the time of writing this document only bfd.cpp was known
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to work)</li>
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</ol>
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After its built, you can use TestPreload and TestMalloc and ShowLibs to
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debug your implementation.
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<p>By setting the LIBMALLOC_LOG environment variable you control how much
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information is logged during the programs execution. See libmalloc.h for
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a definition of the values to use. If you are using LD_PRELOAD, here is
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one way to run your program:
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<blockquote><tt>env LD_PRELOAD=/full/path/to/libleaky.so LIBMALLOC_LOG=1
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my-program</tt></blockquote>
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The debugging malloc library creates two files - "malloc-log" and "malloc-map".
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The malloc-log file can be quite large for large programs (e.g. mozilla)
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so be prepared to have alot of disk space. The malloc-map is tiny.
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<p>Once your program has completed execution you can use leaky to look
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for memory leaks, or at least use it to dump the log. For memory leaks,
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you use leaky like this:
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<blockquote><tt>leaky -d <program-name-goes-here> malloc-log</tt></blockquote>
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Leaky will then display all of the call sites where memory was leaked.
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To look at the entire log file contents, not just the leaks add "-a" to
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the arguments:
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<blockquote><tt>leaky -d -a <program-name-goes-here> malloc-log</tt></blockquote>
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For debugging reference count issues, here is what I do:
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<ol>
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<li>
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Set LIBMALLOC_LOG to "8"</li>
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<li>
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Modify your source code so that your class::Addref and class::Release methods
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call __log_addref and __log_release, as appropriate. See libmalloc.h for
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their signatures.</li>
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<li>
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Run your program so that you get the log data. Its often convenient to
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run your program in the debugger and then set a breakpoint at an interesting
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location where you think some object is being leaked or over-freed. Then
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when the debugger gets there tell it to execute DumpAddressMap. In gdb
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you do this:</li>
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<ol><tt></tt>
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<br><tt>(gdb) p DumpAddressMap()</tt>
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<br><tt></tt> </ol>
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<li>
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Then use leaky to capture the addref and release calls to a log file:</li>
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<ol>
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<br><tt>leaky -d -a <program-name-goes-here> malloc-log > log</tt>
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<br> </ol>
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<li>
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Then use "grep" to search the log for a specific object by grepping for
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its memory address...</li>
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<li>
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On a typical *short* run of mozilla, I'll end up with a malloc-log
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file of around 5 to 10 megabytes and the resulting converted log file will
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be 10 to 20 times that so be prepared to have alot of disk space. It helps
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a great deal to narrow down your problem space to reduce the log file size...</li>
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</ol>
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</body>
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</html>
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