System information

Tracing Tools 199
• ppc64
• System z
17.3.3 General Information
The main advantage of Valgrind is that it works with existing compiled executables.
You do not have to recompile or modify your programs to make use of it. Run Val-
grind like this:
valgrind valgrind_options your-prog your-program-options
Valgrind consists of several tools, and each provides specific functionality. Informa-
tion in this section is general and valid regardless of the used tool. The most important
configuration option is --tool . This option tells Valgrind which tool to run. If you
omit this option, memcheck is selected by default. For example, if you want to run
find ~ -name .bashrc with Valgrind's memcheck tools, enter the following
in the command line:
valgrind --tool=memcheck find ~ -name .bashrc
A list of standard Valgrind tools with a brief description follows:
memcheck
Detects memory errors. It helps you tune your programs to behave correctly.
cachegrind
Profiles cache prediction. It helps you tune your programs to run faster.
callgrind
Works in a similar way to cachegrind but also gathers additional cache-profil-
ing information.
exp-drd
Detects thread errors. It helps you tune your multi-threaded programs to behave
correctly.
helgrind
Another thread error detector. Similar to exp-drd but uses different techniques
for problem analysis.