Using Leak Sanitizer with JHBuild – Happenings in GNOME

For a subset of GNOME modules, I’m still using jhbuild. I also spend a great deal of time tracking down memory bugs in various libraries. So it is very handy to have libasan.so working with meson -Db_sanitize=address.

To make things work, you currently need to:

dnf install libasan liblsan (or similar for your OS).
Use meson from git (0.48 development), for this bug fix.
Configure your meson projects with -Db_sanitize=address.
Create a suppression file for leaks out of our control.
Set some environment variables in ~/.config/jhbuildrc.

Here is an example of what I put in ~/.config/lsan_suppressions.txt.

leak:FcCharSetCreate
leak:FcLangSetCreate
leak:__nptl_deallocate_tsd
leak:_g_info_new_full
leak:dconf_engine_watch_fast
leak:g_get_language_names_with_category
leak:g_intern_string
leak:g_io_module_new
leak:g_quark_init
leak:libfontconfig.so.1

And add this to ~/.config/jhbuildrc.

import os
os.environ['LSAN_OPTIONS'] = 'suppressions=' + \
    os.path.expanduser('~/.config/lsan_suppressions.txt')

This has helped me track down a number of bugs in various modules this week and it would be useful if other people were doing it too.