Since I have begun to use the valgrind memory debugger routinely in rsyslog development (some two years ago), the quality of the source has much increased. Unfortunately, however, valgrind is not able to detect problems related to misaddressing variables on the stack. The 5.3.6 bug I was hunting for almost a week is a good example of this. Valgrind also provides only limited support for global data, as far as I know (and see from testing results).
This becomes an even more important restriction as I moved a lot of former heap memory use to the stack for performance reasons. I remember at least one more major bug hunting effort that was hard to find because it affected only stack space.
So I am currently looking for tools that could complement valgrind by providing good stack checking capabilities. As one tool, mudflap was suggested to me. It sounds interesting, but gives me a very hard time [very hard to read debug output (no symbolic names for dlloade’ed modules, (false?) reports for areas where I can not see anything wrong as well as frequent (threading-related?) crashes when running under instrumentation). Maybe I am just misinterpreting the output…
In short: I would highly appreciate suggestions for tools that can help with debugging stack memory access (global data would be a plus) – and/or instructions on how to interpret mudflap, if that is considered to be *the* tool for that use case.
Thanks,
Rainer