Blog of Tim Janik

I just completed reworking the GSlice and g_malloc() memory debugging hooks. With this, GLib-2.10 (or the next GLib-2.9 development version due this weekend) will (without recompilation) support G_SLICE=always-malloc and G_DEBUG=gc-friendly. These cause all GSlice allocations to go through g_malloc() and g_free() instead and cause all released memory to be memset() to 0. This helps memory checkers to trace pointer lists and can be used to debug g_malloc()/g_free() and g_slice_new()/g_slice_free() allocation code to find and plug memory leaks:

	G_SLICE=always-malloc G_DEBUG=gc-friendly valgrind --leak-check=full mybuggyprogram

Or, in combination with MALLOC_CHECK_, it can be used to catch and debug invalid allocation/release calls:

	G_SLICE=always-malloc G_DEBUG=gc-friendly MALLOC_CHECK_=2 gdb mybuggyprogram