Valgrind for macOS

This repository contains a version of Valgrind including a few patches to improve support for the macOS platform. It is maintained by Louis Brunner.

Status

Version	x86	amd64	arm64	ppc
macOS 10.13 and earlier1	✅	✅	-	❌2
macOS 10.14 (Mojave)	✅	✅	-	-
macOS 10.15 (Catalina)	✅	✅	-	-
macOS 11 (Big Sur)	-	✅	❌3	-
macOS 12 (Monterey)	-	✅	❌3	-
macOS 13 (Ventura)	-	✅	❌3	-
macOS 14 (Sonoma)	-	✅	❌3	-
macOS 15 (Sequoia)	-	✅	❌3	-

Note that every version from macOS 10.12 onwards currently has the following issues:

• crash when using wqthread which is used in certain UI frameworks, especially Apple's, e.g. CoreFoundation (#4)
• using threads and signals together is undefined (crashes, hanging, etc), note: a few tests were disabled because of that
• drd thread related crash on 10.15 (probably onwards)
• lots of -UNHANDLED messages on macOS 12 and earlier

Usage

In case you already have Valgrind installed, you might need to brew remove it first.

In order to use this version, first tap this repository:

brew tap LouisBrunner/valgrind

Then, install valgrind:

brew install --HEAD LouisBrunner/valgrind/valgrind

It is possible that Homebrew shows you the following error message afterwards:

error: Invalid usage: --HEAD is not supported with HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API unset! To resolve please run:
  export HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1
  brew tap Homebrew/core
and retry this command.

If so, just execute both commands and retry the installation as mentioned above.

You can now use valgrind as normal.

Note: in case of failures during the build, make sure you have the latest Xcode/CLI tools installed.

Update

Any brew upgrade will now correctly rebuild the latest LouisBrunner/valgrind instead of the upstream one (which doesn't support latest macOS versions).

brew upgrade --fetch-HEAD LouisBrunner/valgrind/valgrind

Tests

Some tests are hanging and were therefore disabled on macOS:

• none/tests/pselect_alarm
• none/tests/pth_term_signal

Linux (Ubuntu 20.04)

These errors seem to come from the CI environment itself (as they show with or without my changes).

== 730 tests, 13 stderr failures, 0 stdout failures, 0 stderrB failures, 0 stdoutB failures, 0 post failures ==
memcheck/tests/overlap                   (stderr)
drd/tests/pth_mutex_signal               (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_cmsg                   (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_creat                  (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_dup                    (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_dup2                   (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_fcntl                  (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_ipv4                   (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_open                   (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_pipe                   (stderr)
none/tests/fdleak_socketpair             (stderr)
none/tests/rlimit64_nofile               (stderr)
none/tests/rlimit_nofile                 (stderr)

should be (according to the official builds)

== 789 tests, 1 stderr failure, 0 stdout failures, 0 stderrB failures, 0 stdoutB failures, 0 post failures ==
memcheck/tests/linux/sys-preadv2_pwritev2 (stderr)

macOS

See .github/macos-VERSION-expected.txt for more details about which tests pass on which version.

Footnotes

1. Supported as part of upstream Valgrind. ↩

2. PowerPC is unsupported (#62) ↩

3. Apple Silicon support in progress (#56) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵