Valgrind: An Open-Source Memory Debugger for x86-linux - Julian Seward

Valgrind is a GPL'd tool to help you find memory-management problems in your programs. You can use it to debug more-or-less any dynamically-linked ELF Linux x86 executable, without modification, recompilation, or anything. It works by translating x86 code to instrumented x86 code, on the fly i.e. a virtual machine. Valgrind can detect problems such as:

* Use of uninitialised memory; * Reading/writing memory after it has been free'd; * Reading/writing off the end of malloc'd blocks; * Reading/writing inappropriate areas on the stack; * Memory leaks - where pointers to malloc'd blocks are lost forever; * Passing of uninitialised and/or unaddressible memory to system calls; * Mismatched use of malloc/new/new [] vs free/delete/delete [].

Julian Seward is a Compiler hacker and open-source contributor. Worked recently on the Glasgow Haskell compiler, GHC, which is under a BSD-style license. Also the author of bzip2 (data compressor), cacheprof (a tool for locating the sources of D-cache misses).

Date: Sunday 1st September 2002 Time: 6.30pm Venue: Comlab The meeting will (as always), be followed by drinks at the Lamb and Flag.

Comlab entrance is from Parks Road and there are maps at http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/ox/maps.html

============ Other events ============ Thurs 29th August, London Perl Mongers Damian Conway on Perl 6, 6.30pm, in the Conway Hall (by Holborn tube, Central line) http://london.pm.org/meetings/damian.html

Mon 9th Sept, 6.45pm - OS X, David Pogue - London (UKUUG) http://www.ukuug.org/events/pogue/

Sat 14th Sept, Greater London LUG - talks still to be arranged http://zope.linux.co.uk/20020907.html

Weds 9th Oct - Thurs 10th Oct, Linux Expo, Olympia http://www.linuxexpouk.co.uk/ for advance registration

Next month's OxLUG probably delayed by a week to Sunday 13th October (to Sunday 1st Week of University term) but we'll try to arrange at least one more (mid-month) training session before then.