Tips for debugging with Valgrind

• Some earlier Valgrind versions did not support AVX properly and will crash in some Carbonite code. This issue doesn’t occur in newer Valgrind versions, such as 3.16.0.

• It is recommended to increase the backtrace size using --num-callers=<number>. Valgrind’s default backtrace depth is 12, which is often not sufficient for Carbonite code.

• When checking for memory leaks with --leak-check=full, you may notice a large number of ‘possibly lost’ leaks (particularly from libasound). Use --show-leak-kinds=definite to only see detections that are guaranteed to be memory leaks.

• When Carbonite plugins are unloaded, Valgrind will not be able to find the symbol names for functions in its backtraces that were part of the unloaded code. This can be a problem when trying to detect memory leaks in tests. Putting exit(0) at the end of a test case is generally sufficient as a workaround.

• Valgrind executes programs serially and uses an unfair thread scheduling algorithm, which can cause threads to appear to hang. The --fair-sched=yes parameter can be used to switch to a fair scheduler which will avoid these hangs. This parameter must be specified when using any code that interacts with IAudioPlayback.

• If you build Valgrind from source and install to a non-system directory (such as your home folder), the environment variable VALGRIND_LIB needs to point to the lib/valgrind directory in the install directory.