Jan 17, 2013
Valgrind and iOS
I’m working in Mail.ru now. My primary task is to fix memory management and concurrency problems in a complicated project written by a team of six people.
I had a nice experience using Valgrind tool on Linux system, so I started to investigate to possibility of using Valgrind with iOS.
The results are:
- Valgrind works only on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is not supported yet).
- Valgrind works only in simulator. There is no way to run it on a iPhone/iPad device.
- Valgrind works only with iOS 5.0. iOS 6.0 is not supported.
In order to run valgrind you should:
- Get an Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Fortunately, we have an old MacBook Pro with OS X 10.7 for testing purpose.
- Install XCode. XCode 4.5.2 works fine.
- Obtain a copy of valgrind‘s source from http://valgrind.org/downloads/. I took the svn version, but mac ports version works as well.
- I used this trick to launch an application under valgrind in the simulator. I didn’t need to tack memory leaks, so I’m using –leack-check=no and –dsynutil=yes options.
This solution works fine for Mac OS X applications, too; however, make sure you are using Mac OS X 10.7. Looks like there is a difference in the threading model between Darwin 11 and Darwin 12; valgrind error message says:
valgrind: m_syswrap/syswrap-amd64-darwin.c:460 (void wqthread_hijack(Addr, Addr, Addr, Addr, Int, Addr)): Assertion 'VG_(is_valid_tid)(tid)' failed.
