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Mac OS X Valgrind

Valgrind + Mac OS X update (April 17, 2009)

It’s time for the April update on the progress of the Mac OS X port of Valgrind.  It’s been a quieter month because I was on vacation for over 3 weeks, and Julian Seward hasn’t had a great deal of time to work on the port either.  Even still, in that time 77 commits have been made to the DARWIN branch.

Here are the current (as of r9567) values of the metrics I have been using as a means of tracking progress.

  • The number of regression test failures on Mac was 422/172/41/0. It’s now 418/128/43/0. I.e. the number of failures went from 213 to 171.  If we ignore the tools Helgrind, DRD and exp-Ptrcheck (which are not widely used and still completely broken on the branch) the number of failures dropped from 92 to 50.  So the functionality of the branch is progressing well.
  • The size of the diff between the trunk and the branch was 38,248 lines (1.3MB). It’s now 39,027 lines (1.3MB). However, 2,223 of these lines are code that was cut, but was put in a text file for reference.  So the more realistic number would be 36,804 lines (1.2MB).  This metric was intended to indicate how close the branch is to being ready to merge with the trunk, but it doesn’t do that very well, so I will stop using it in the future.
  • Instead, I’m going to use a new metric:  the number of “FIXME”-style marker comments that indicate something in the code that needs to be fixed.  A lot of these mark Darwin-specific code that works correctly, but hasn’t been abstracted cleanly.  When this approaches zero, it will mean that the branch should be very close to merge-ready.  (Actually, the branch may be merge-ready before it reaches zero.)  The current number of these 274.  (The task-tracking used within Valgrind is mostly pretty informal, you can get away with it when there’s only a handful of frequent contributors!) That number is quite high, but a lot of those will be easy to fix.

Functionality improvements are as follows.

  • The build system now works with older versions of automake (pre 1.10).  automake’s handling of assembly code files (specifically, whether AM_CPPFLAGS is used for them) changed in 1.10, and the build system wasn’t working with older versions.
  • Some extra system calls are handled, enough that iTunes apparently now runs (although I haven’t tried it myself).
  • -mdynamic-no-pic is now used for compilation of Valgrind.  This turns off position-independent code, which (strangely enough) is the default for GCC on Darwin.  This speeds up most programs at least a little, and in some cases up to 30%.
  • Some more signal-handling improvements.

So things are still moving along well.