Crowley Code! 
 (Take 12)

mtrace, and the bug I've been chasing for weeks 2008/08/26

mtrace(1) and mtrace(3) are my new bicycle.  The manual for debugging tool design should read SEE ALSO mtrace(1), mtrace(3).  One header file, one environment variable and one on/off switch.

The catch to this free lunch is that it doesn't completely work with C++. If run over a C program, it can print the file/line that allocated a leaked block.  If run over a C++ program, it can't do anything but count blocks that are allocated but not freed.  This is still gun-in-a-knife-fight useful.  Saying it's a C++ issue is a bit of a lie: because the new and delete operators use malloc internally, allocations using these operators are reported as coming from libstdc++.  If you use malloc in C++, it works fine.  Because the actual call to malloc or free is within new or delete, the file/line notation is at best useless and at worst an unadorned memory address.

I found it beneficial to create a single-threaded "test script" version of my program for mtrace-ing.  With a bunch of threads thrashing about, there was too much noise from freeing memory that had been allocated in other threads for the output to be very useful.  Fortunately, removing threads was (for me) a functional and expedient solution.

The bug turned out to be difficult to find but embarrassing, so I'm not going to tell you what it was.

Comments (4)

  1. Lame! I want to know what the bug was. I've listened to you bitch about it for weeks, I deserve to know!

    mtrace sounds fancy though..  wonder if it works with objective-c. I bet it's used internally by instruments.

    Mike Malone — 2008/08/26 11:57 am

  2. When a multithreaded program crashes, does it give you more than one core dump?  I ask because crashing on mpi gives you a core dump for every processor.  So, say I crash on mpirun -np 128 on blue gene, I have 128 core dumps and that's a bitch.

    David Hall — 2008/08/26 5:03 pm

  3. I just read your SVN commit and I can't figure it out since you removed your debugging and other stuff in the same commit.  Well that and I'm not good at computers.

    Awesome to hear you got it licked though.

    PS, Richard must have been embarrassed, he usually makes good clear commit messages but this one is marked simply "Fixed. Testing." :-)

    — David Ulevitch — 2008/08/26 6:08 pm

  4. Stop being a pansy and tell the people what they wanna know.

    Mike P — 2008/08/27 2:07 pm

Richard Crowley?  Kentuckian engineer who cooks and eats in between bicycling and beering.

I blog mostly about programming and databases.  Browse by month or tag.

To blame for...


© 2009 Richard Crowley.  Managed by Bashpress.