Run Valgrind in a container

Valgrind may be difficult if not impossible to install on macOS (X86/Darwin (> 10.10, 10.11), AMD64/Darwin (> 10.10, 10.11)), and if succesfully installed it may not run properly or may not run at all.

A workaround for this is to run Valgrind in a Linux container. Some extra work is required, such as compilation for the container's platform, but what you do get is a properly running Valgrind.

Usage

First, start the container so that your source code is bind mounted in the container, and also an interactive session is started:

docker run -tiv $PWD/path/to/my/files:/valgrind karek/valgrind:latest

After starting the container, your terminal should look something like this:

root@e5215faf4f73:/valgrind# 

Now you may compile your projact as usual, but for the container's platform (x86_64). The container has basic build tools installed:

• dpkg-dev (>= 1.17.11)
• g++ (>= 4:5.2)
• GNU C++ compiler
• gcc (>= 4:5.2)
• GNU C compiler
• libc6-dev
• GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Header Files or libc-dev
• make
• cmake

Run valgrind as usual:

root@e5215faf4f73:/valgrind# valgrind ./your_executable

Google Test is cloned in /usr/local/src/googletest/googletest and pre-compiled to two static libraries libgtest.a and libgtest_main.a in /usr/local/lib

There is a sample Makefile demonstrating how to compile unit tests with Google Test.

A Memory debugging example

Start the container with:

docker run -tiv $PWD/examples:/valgrind karek/valgrind:latest

Once in the container, compile leak.cpp and run it in Valgrind:

root@d3e8ebc051b8:/valgrind# make && valgrind ./leak
g++    -c -o leak.o leak.cpp
g++ -o leak leak.o
==19== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==19== Copyright (C) 2002-2017, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==19== Using Valgrind-3.13.0 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==19== Command: ./leak
==19== 
0
1
2
==19== 
==19== HEAP SUMMARY:
==19==     in use at exit: 24 bytes in 1 blocks
==19==   total heap usage: 3 allocs, 2 frees, 73,752 bytes allocated
==19== 
==19== LEAK SUMMARY:
==19==    definitely lost: 24 bytes in 1 blocks
==19==    indirectly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==19==      possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==19==    still reachable: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==19==         suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==19== Rerun with --leak-check=full to see details of leaked memory
==19== 
==19== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==19== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)