Valgrind tools automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and is able to profile your programs in detail. It runs on the following platforms: X86/Linux, AMD64/Linux, ARM/Linux, PPC32/Linux, PPC64/Linux, S390X/Linux, ARM/Android (2.3.x), X86/Darwin and AMD64/Darwin (Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7)

According to Valgrind, a number of useful tools are supplied as standard.

1. Memcheck is a memory error detector. It helps you make your programs, particularly those written in C and C++, more correct.
2. Cachegrind is a cache and branch-prediction profiler. It helps you make your programs run faster.
3. Callgrind is a call-graph generating cache profiler. It has some overlap with Cachegrind, but also gathers some information that Cachegrind does not.
4. Helgrind is a thread error detector. It helps you make your multi-threaded programs more correct.
5. DRD is also a thread error detector. It is similar to Helgrind but uses different analysis techniques and so may find different problems.
6. Massif is a heap profiler. It helps you make your programs use less memory.
7. DHAT is a different kind of heap profiler. It helps you understand issues of block lifetimes, block utilisation, and layout inefficiencies.
8. SGcheck is an experimental tool that can detect overruns of stack and global arrays. Its functionality is complementary to that of Memcheck: SGcheck finds problems that Memcheck can’t, and vice versa..
9. BBV is an experimental SimPoint basic block vector generator. It is useful to people doing computer architecture research and development.

Compilation of Valgrind

Compilation is very straightforward……

# tar -xvjpf valgrind-3.7.0.tar.bz2
# cd valgrind-3.7.0
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/valgrind-3.7.0
# make; make install

Testing Valgrind

# /usr/local/valgrind-3.7.0/bin/valgrind ls -l

Either this works, or it bombs out with some complaint.