memory leak detection patch

Mike McCormack mike at codeweavers.com
Thu Sep 22 03:02:03 CDT 2005


Andreas Mohr wrote:

> I think that we should concentrate on making valgrind the default leak
> detection method in Wine, however.
> 
> Reasons:
> - it catches many, many leaks *without any reprogramming effort*
> - it catches many, many other problems
> - it has other tools which are very useful, too (cache profiling, ...)
> - it's so much better than any other "clever hack" that people come up with
>   in 2 hours

Valgrind is great, and I've used it before, but it's a little heavy duty 
for what I want at the moment.

The main disadvantages are:

- it slows down Wine and programs running Wine. (Office 2003 install 
already takes a minute or so)
- it doesn't differenciate between Wine leaking memory and a program 
running in Wine leaking memory
- it requires a patched version of Wine to run
- it isn't built into Wine (ie. I could ship this patch with minimal 
overhead, and have my users point out memory leaks)
- it has issues following forks, and being run from scripts

The patch is not meant to replace valgrind, just to provide another way 
of finding problems in Wine code.

Mike



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