Valgrind and Java

Question

I want to use Valgrind 3.7.0 to find memory leaks in my Java native code. I\'m using jdk1.6.0._29.

To do that, I have to set the --trace-children=yes flag. Setting

Answer 1

You must disable JIT to run the JVM under valgrind, like so:

valgrind java -Djava.compiler=NONE ...

Also, if you end up using generated suppressions (and you most likely will!), there can be a problem with the depth of the call stacks in the generated suppressions, which is more likely to occur when running under the JVM.

In recent versions of valgrind, generated suppressions can contain deeper call stacks than can be processed by valgrind/memcheck itself. The symptom of this problem is that valgrind terminates unexpectedly with the message "too many callers in stack trace".

This problem is easily fixed: before building valgrind, edit the file coregrind/m_errormgr.c and change the hard-coded value in the #define to a larger value (I use 99):

 /* Max number of callers for context in a suppression. */

 #define VG_MAX_SUPP_CALLERS  99

Then build and install valgrind as per the docs.

Answer 2

Valgrind traps and emulates (to a degree) the processor, this is seemingly causing the JVM to get confused about your support for SSE and bailing out

I would suggest your try telling the JVM not to bother with SSE, you should be able to turn this off for hotspot with the JVM flag -XX:UseSSE=0

Good luck! valgrinding the JVM is a bit hard as they are somewhat hostile to each other

It might also be your version of valgrind and java I ran your command from above locally and had no problems, using valgrind 3.6.1 and both java 1.6.0_26 and java 1.7.0-b147