Dear all, I've been trying to get clear on exactly what the situation between Gtk+ and Valgrind is. There is a fair amount of information out there, but it's pretty scattered and mainly fairly old, so it'd be good to get it all in one place.
As far as I understand it, the situation is that memory checkers like Valgrind throw a huge number of errors when used on Gtk programmes. This mainly seems to be due to memory which is allocated when the application begins, which needs to be kept for the entire lifetime of the programme. Since the memory will be freed by the OS when the application closes anyway, Gtk doesn't make an effort to track it and free it at the end. This creates the problem that even though these aren't harmful, they give us a Valgrind log with thousands of entries which is almost impossible to interpret. The way to get around this is to generate a suppression file which tells valgrind that we don't want to treat these cases as leaks. We can also tell Gtk not to use some of its optimisations which will confuse Valgrind by setting the G_SLICE=always-malloc G_DEBUG=gc-friendly flags when we run Valgrind. So, is this (fairly crude) summary correct and can anyone give me any more info? In particular, generating a suppression file from the output of valgrind is non-trivial and a real pain (c.f. http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Valgrind_Suppression_File_Howto).<http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Valgrind_Suppression_File_Howto%29.> It would be better if I knew which places Gtk does things which upset valgrind, so I could write the suppression file properly (rather than just trying to reverse engineer it from valgrind's output). So, can anyone give me a good explanation of exactly what/where Gtk (does to)/upsets Valgrind? Failing that, does anyone have a suppression file that works on the current version of Gtk? Best wishes, Tom _______________________________________________ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
