mpatrol

Support for the -fcheck-memory-usage option of the GNU compiler has been added, as well as the hexwords command to extract any words from a dictionary file that can be written as hexadecimal numbers. The mpsym command can now make use of perl if it is installed rather than using the slower method of calling awk and sed. The library now allocates internal memory with mmap() by default, and with sbrk() when the USEMMAP option is used, but only if the mmap() system call is supported. The MP_USE_ATEXIT feature macro has been added to force the mpatrol library to be registered with atexit() instead of using alternative methods to automatically terminate the library, if they exist. Two new tests demonstrating the support for -fcheck-memory-usage have also been added.

New TRACE and TRACEFILE options to handle memory allocation tracing, a SHOWFREE option to display information about free memory blocks, a new mptrace command to decode a tracing output file into tabular (and possibly graphical) form, and new %d, %t, and %f filename characters to be replaced with the current date, current time, and full path of the executable.

Initialisation and termination of the mpatrol library has been improved when compiling on ELF, GNU, or C++ systems. All memory deallocations resulting from C++ file-scope destructors will be recorded as a result. The thread-safe shared library version of mpatrol was not being built correctly with the GNU linker. This has been fixed, and the library is properly initialised. The RPM package spec file has been improved to keep in line with the Red Hat PowerTools release. A new ability to build an SD/UX package for use on HP/UX has been added, along with documentation on how to create shared libraries from archive libraries when using the GNU linker.

The alloca(), strdupa(), strndupa() and dealloca() functions were added. The CHECKMEMORY, EDIT and LIST options were added. Error abbreviation codes were added, and byte offsets were added to stack traces. Long command-line options were added, and the implicit LOGALL in the mpatrol command was removed. The ability to write out graph specification files with mprof was added. The mpedit and mpsym commands were added. Other changes too numerous to list were also made.

The NOFREE option takes an argument which specifies the maximum number of freed memory allocations to preserve before returning the oldest to the free memory pool. A regression fix has been added for displaying the summary after an illegal memory access. The signal-handler is now thread-safe. 64-bit support has been added for SPARC Solaris platforms. Other additions include support for the -d option on DYNIX/ptx and support for threads on DYNIX/ptx. The FAQ has been moved into the mpatrol manual.