在没有valgrind的情况下（或使用最少的valgrind类应用程序）在嵌入式系统上寻找内存泄漏

Question

I'm working with embedded linux development, and we're currently having some trouble with some memory page allocation faults, which led me to believe we have a leak somewhere.

Currently, I am trying to cross compile valgrind to use on our system, but I'm losing my faith on this solution because of the sheer amount of memory valgrind will use up (we have serious memory restrictions).

This has made me wonder: is there any way of hunting for a memory leak without valgrind or with a valgrind-like application with minimal memory usage? Creating wrappers for malloc() and free() is out of question.

Also, the test that caused the allocation failures was a simple stress test of copying a file n times and checking its md5sum, in case anyone is curious.

I'm using the Linaro toolchain for cross compiling, glibc 2.15, and the system is set up without a swap partition. The system has around 64MB of RAM, making valgrind, or any other memory intensive application a tad difficult to use.

Regards, Guilherme

Answer 1

Since you are using glibc, you should have its built-in memory-tracing support available to you. Your program would enable this by calling mtrace(3) at or near startup. mtrace() installs hook functions into the memory allocator to log allocations and deallocations, under runtime control via environment variable MALLOC_TRACE .

You probably also want to be aware of mtrace(1) , a Perl script for interpreting log files produced by the mtrace facility.

This facility traces only allocations and deallocations, which is much less than Valgrind does. Nevertheless, those are the main items of interest when you are looking for a memory leak.