Re: LLVM Address Sanitizer (ASAN) and valgrind support

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 06:14:28PM +0100, Greg Stark wrote:
> On Oct 20, 2016 5:27 PM, "Noah Misch" <noah@leadboat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 11:08:39AM +0100, Greg Stark wrote:
> > > The MEMPOOL_FREE doesn't take any size argument and mcxt.c doesn't
> > > have convenient access to a size argument. It could call the
> > > GetChunkSpace method but that will include the allocation overhead and
> >
> > That is indeed a problem for making VALGRIND_MEMPOOL_FREE() an alias of
> > VALGRIND_MAKE_MEM_NOACCESS() under ASAN as I suggested.  Calling
> > GetMemoryChunkSpace() in the macro would cause memdebug.h to embed an
> > assumption of mcxt.c, which is messy.  Including the allocation overhead is
> > fine, though.
> 
> I think the way out is to simply have aset.c make the memory
> undefined/noaccess even if it's redundant under valgrind. It's a bit
> unfortunate that the macros would have different semantics under the two.
> If it's too confusing or we're worried about the performance overhead we
> could make a MAKE_MEM_{UNDEFINED,NOACCESS}_IF_NO_MEMPOOL() but I don't
> think it's worth it myself.

I don't expect much performance overhead.  When I last benchmarked Valgrind
Memcheck of "make installcheck", a !USE_VALGRIND build (no client requests at
all) saved about 5% of runtime.  A single new client request should be cheap
enough.  (Marking otherwise-redundant calls may still be good, though.)

> There are a couple build oddities both with gcc and clang before I can
> commit anything though. And I can't test valgrind to be sure the redundant
> calls aren't causing a problem.

When you submit your patch to a CommitFest, mention that you're blocked on
having a reviewer who can test Valgrind.  Many reviewers can help.

Thanks,
nm