Memory Debuggers for HP-UX B.11.11 OS

[Katherine Pak]

Has anyone been able to successfully implement a memory debugger on an HP-UX B 11.11?

I was unable to get any of the following open source memory debuggers to build on the HP-UX 11.11: mpatrol 1.4.8, njamd 0.9.3, Fortify 2.2, Electric Fence 2.1.13, and dmalloc 5.4.2

Any proven solutions out there that would work on 11.11 ?

Thanks,
Katherine

[Ivan Krastev]

Hi Katherine,

dmalloc is available at - http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Users/dmalloc-5.4.2/


regards,
ivan

[Dennis Handly]

Have you tried wdb? You can download from:
http://www.hp.com/go/wdb

[Katherine Pak]

Thanks for the link, Ivan. However, when I try to link I get the following linker error:

/usr/ccs/bin/ld: Invalid loader fixup in text space needed in output file for symbol "dmalloc_shutdown" in input file "/home/myself/dmalloc/dmalloc-RUN/usr/local/lib/libdmallocxx.a(malloc.o)"
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
gmake: *** [libMySharedLib.sl] Error 1

I chose the HP-UX 11i, v1 (HP-UX 11.11), which seems to be a binary distribution. I am using gcc 3.3.3; cannot find which gcc version was used to create the above binaries. So I may need to download the HP-UX sources and recreate the shared libs? I am hoping the source code from this site will have taken care of the bugs I ran into building from the package I downloaded from dmalloc's site.



--------------------------
Hi Katherine,

dmalloc is available at - http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Users/dmalloc-5.4.2/


regards,
ivan

[Katherine Pak]

Thanks for the link, Dennis.

I did download the wdb and its gui bundle. From the docs it indicates that it
is compatible with C++ code compiled with aCC--no mention of g++-compiled source?
Our sources are compiled with gcc 3.3.3.

I am reading the docs that are not all that helpful. There does not appear to be much to
the installation than adding to $PATH. The executables do not seem to work yet. I will
keep reading up though it does not look too promising right now.

=================================
Have you tried wdb? You can download from:
http://www.hp.com/go/wdb

[Dennis Handly]

>/usr/ccs/bin/ld: Invalid loader fixup in text space needed in output file for symbol "dmalloc_shutdown" in input file

This indicates a bug in gcc. You may be able to work around the problem by removing "const" from the symbol that is taking the address of dmalloc_shutdown.

>From the docs it indicates that it
is compatible with C++ code compiled with aCC--no mention of g++-compiled source?
Our sources are compiled with gcc 3.3.3.

If it doesn't work for g++, it should at least track the malloc/free calls.

>I am reading the docs that are not all that helpful. There does not appear to be much to
the installation than adding to $PATH. The executables do not seem to work yet.

What info is missing? Which executables don't work, yours? How do they fail?

>I will keep reading up though it does not look too promising right now.

What doesn't look promising?

[sassan]

Assuming your applications are built by aCC (HP C or C++ compilers), you can try the memory debugging feature in WDB, HP's enhanced GDB.

You can download WDB from:
hp.com/go/wdb
and read the "Debugging Memory Problems" section (page 123) in the user guide under:
http://h21007.www2.hp.com/dspp/files/unprotected/devresource/Tools/wdb/doc/gdb.pdf

[Katherine Pak]

In response to Dennis' last post:

(1) On the dmalloc: So then in order to implement the workaround, I would need to download the source (from HP) and recompile with the modifications?

(2) I downloaded the wdb bundle and unpacked in my local $HOME dir. I added the following to $PATH:

$HOME/wdb/WDB/WDB/opt/langtools/bin/.
$HOME/wdb/WDB-GUI/WDB-GUI-RUN/opt/langtools/bin

When I try to execute wdb I get a: "cannot execute binary file". Does this need to be installed somewhere in order to run it? If so, where? There is not much written in the docs on installation.

I tried to execute with the following: (from xterm):

gdb a.out
$HOME/wdb/WDB/WDB/opt/langtools/bin/vdb a.out

"cannot execute binary file"

[Carl Burch]

The "HP WDB installation guidelines" are at:
http://h21007.www2.hp.com/dspp/tech/tech_TechDocumentDetailPage_IDX/1,1701,9305,00.html

The files you download aren't tarballs (other than the source tarball, which is labelled as a tarball), they're gzipped software depots - which have to be installed with the swinstall tool. This is all described at the link above.

- Carl Burch
HP WDB Team

[Katherine Pak]

We now have wdb swinstalled. Despite the wdb docs which state that it only supports aCC-compiled C++ code, wdb seems to find the g++-compiled source. I am going to keep playing around with it, try to tap into the memory debug features. The UI is very nice.

Thanks, everyone, for your inputs!
Katherine

[Carl Burch]

Katherine-

That's good news! If you have further questions about WDB, you can mail the project team direct at wdb-help@cup.hp.com.

- Carl Burch
HP WDB Team