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fuchsia / fuchsia / ee37c146332dea8f30536b76839190cc6e839f2d / . / src / ledger / lib / detect_leak
tree: 6f16b4a5cd0e70b473881d36c232b243a3544278 [path history] [tgz]
  1. BUILD.gn
  2. detect_leak.cc
  3. README.md
src/ledger/lib/detect_leak/README.md

Leak detector library

Description

This library implements a crud memory leak detection mechanism using ASAN.

Both ASAN and MSAN have better mechanisms, but none of these are currently available on Fuchsia. When any of these becomes available, this library should be removed from the repository.

This library works by keeping track of allocation and deallocation. Once a given number of allocations that have not been released has been made, it finds the stack that is responsible for the most unreleased allocations and use ASAN to stop the program and show the given stack.

To use this library, one must:

  1. Add //src/ledger/lib/detect_leak as a dependency of the binary that has a leak.
  2. Adjust kKeepAlloc in //src/ledger/lib/detect_leak/detect_leak.cc: one wants this to be big enough that the stack with the most unreleased allocations will be a leak, but increasing it will also increase the time the binary needs to run before returning a result.
  3. Run the binary under ASAN and wait for it to crash. When this happens, ASAN will display a diagnostic about a double free error. The release stacks are irrelevant. The allocation stack will be the stack that had the most unreleased allocations at the time of the crash.