• Home
  • Line#
  • Scopes#
  • Navigate#
  • Raw
  • Download
1<?xml version="1.0"?> <!-- -*- sgml -*- -->
2<!DOCTYPE chapter PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
3          "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd"
4[ <!ENTITY % vg-entities SYSTEM "../../docs/xml/vg-entities.xml"> %vg-entities; ]>
5
6
7<chapter id="design-impl"
8         xreflabel="The design and implementation of Valgrind">
9
10<title>The Design and Implementation of Valgrind</title>
11
12
13<para>A number of academic publications nicely describe many aspects
14of Valgrind's design and implementation.  Online copies of all of
15them, and others, are available on the <ulink url="&vg-pubs-url;">Valgrind
16publications page</ulink>.</para>
17
18<para>The following paper gives a good overview of Valgrind, and explains
19how it differs from other dynamic binary instrumentation frameworks such as
20Pin and DynamoRIO.</para>
21
22<itemizedlist>
23  <listitem>
24    <para>
25    <command>Valgrind: A Framework for Heavyweight Dynamic Binary
26    Instrumentation.  Nicholas Nethercote and Julian Seward.  Proceedings
27    of ACM SIGPLAN 2007 Conference on Programming Language Design and
28    Implementation (PLDI 2007), San Diego, California, USA, June
29    2007.</command>
30    </para>
31  </listitem>
32</itemizedlist>
33
34
35<para>The following two papers together give a comprehensive description of
36how most of Memcheck works.  The first paper describes in detail how
37Memcheck's undefined value error detection (a.k.a. V bits) works.  The
38second paper describes in detail how Memcheck's shadow memory is
39implemented, and compares it to other alternative approaches.
40</para>
41
42<itemizedlist>
43  <listitem>
44    <para><command>Using Valgrind to detect undefined value errors with
45    bit-precision.  Julian Seward and Nicholas Nethercote.  Proceedings
46    of the USENIX'05 Annual Technical Conference, Anaheim, California,
47    USA, April 2005.</command>
48    </para>
49
50    <para><command>How to Shadow Every Byte of Memory Used by a Program.
51    Nicholas Nethercote and Julian Seward.  Proceedings of the Third
52    International ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS Conference on Virtual Execution
53    Environments (VEE 2007), San Diego, California, USA, June
54    2007.</command>
55    </para>
56  </listitem>
57</itemizedlist>
58
59
60<para>The following paper describes Callgrind.</para>
61
62<itemizedlist>
63  <listitem>
64    <para><command>A Tool Suite for Simulation Based Analysis of Memory Access
65    Behavior.  Josef Weidendorfer, Markus Kowarschik and Carsten
66    Trinitis.  Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on
67    Computational Science (ICCS 2004), Krakow, Poland, June 2004.</command>
68    </para>
69  </listitem>
70</itemizedlist>
71
72<para>The following dissertation describes Valgrind in some detail
73(many of these details are now out-of-date) as well as Cachegrind,
74Annelid and Redux.  It also covers some underlying theory about
75dynamic binary analysis in general and what all these tools have in
76common.</para>
77
78<itemizedlist>
79  <listitem>
80    <para><command>Dynamic Binary Analysis and Instrumentation.  Nicholas
81    Nethercote.</command>  PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, November
82    2004.</para>
83  </listitem>
84</itemizedlist>
85
86
87</chapter>
88