Valgrind BoF and Hackaton

FOSDEM 2017

Come and hack on Valgrind together. Open discussion about small (or big) ideas to improve or change Valgrind.

Valgrind developers and users are encouraged to participate either by submitting ideas/suggestions or by joining the discussion. And of course by kindly (or bitterly) complain about bugs you find important that are still Not YET solved for that many years!?@!!!

Afterwards we will sit together and try to fix or implement some of the things discussed.

Discuss any kind of possible improvement (technical or functional) to Valgrind.

If you want to put something on the agenda please send a small description (one or two paragraphs) to the the moderator Mark Wielaard mjw@redhat.com with in the subject: "FOSDEM devroom discuss: ..." If you want to discuss a somewhat larger topic please do feel free to send two or three slides in advance.

Mark will collect ideas/suggestions/... and present these and coordinate the discussion (and keep track of the time, so every idea will be discussed).

Some discussion topic ideas:

Release/bugfixing strategy/policy.
Can we move to git yet?
Valgrind and transactional memory.
Making Valgrind really multi-threaded, parallelising Memcheck, parallelising the rest of the framework, and tools.
Instant leak detector. Modify memcheck to report the last leaked pointer to a block. Integrate "omega" as a memcheck option or omega as a separate tool. http://www.brainmurders.eclipse.co.uk/omega.html
Make Callgrind work sanely on ARM (and PPC). The Callgrind algorithm to track call and return is to be improved to work properly on these platforms. Is there a way to make this better? E.g. by having a fast way working in most cases, and rely on unwind info in the difficult cases. Can we detect at instrumentation time that an instruction is a difficult case?
Packaging valgrind for distros, handling patches, suppressions, etc.
32-bit x86 vs modern instruction sets (avx, etc.)
VEX is in theory cross-architecture. What would it take to make valgrind cross-arch? How about starting with i686 on x86_64?
Which CPUID is it anyway? Valgrind isn't completely consistent in handling host CPU capabilities vs VEX emulation capabilities. What can we do to improve that? Make it user tunable?
<YOUR SUGGESTION HERE!>

And now is the time on Sprockets when we hack!

Speakers: Mark Wielaard