valgrinding x

2007-03-12T22:39:00Z

Have been feeling rather unwell for the past couple of days, so I decided, while I feel like death warmed up, how could hacking at Valgrind possibly make it worse?

I took Tilman Sauerbeck's extended version of Dave Airlie's valgrind-mmt, and cleaned up a couple of minor bits -- changed the offset to be specified in hex, added support for repetitions (e.g. 'repeated 255 times', instead of the same line 256 times over), and also added support for the in*/out* family on AMD64, which was quite entertaining as I've not really touched either assembly or Valgrind before. Got it working in the end, despite libVEX's best efforts to frustrate me, and ended up feeling slightly better as well. Huzzah.

Anyway, 'sudo valgrind --tool=mmt --offset=0xc1000000[0] /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -ac > x.log 2>&1' will trap all MMIO accesses made by X or its VBIOS, provided you run the BIOS through x86emu instead of lrmi.

Postscript: spent a few minutes after writing this trying to figure out if there was anything I should've said, and didn't. Now, hours later, I realise there was one minor detail omitted: the URL. gitweb is just there, and the anonymous clone URL is git://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/valgrind.

[0]: Get the base address with lspci -v. Your video card should have two PCI regions, of which one is big (your main video memory), and the other one is 32 or 64kB (the MMIO space, i.e. the bit you want).

diary of a window system hacker

valgrinding x