Horton

Re: Why our Valgrind reports suck

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>

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From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2025-05-23T15:42:49Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
Hi,

On 2025-05-22 21:48:24 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> >> But this is the last step to get to zero reported leaks in a run of the core
> >> regression tests, so let's do it.
> 
> > I assume that's just about the core tests, not more? I.e. I can't make skink
> > enable leak checking?
> 
> No, we're not there yet.  I've identified some other backend issues (in
> postgres_fdw in particular), and I've not looked at frontend programs
> at all.  For most frontend programs, I'm dubious how much we care.

Skink only tests backend stuff anyway, but the other backend issues make it a
no go for no...


> I'm envisioning this patch series as v19 work, were you
> thinking we should be more aggressive?

Mostly agreed - but I am wondering if the AV fix should be backpatched?

Greetings,

Andres Freund

Commits

  1. Undo thinko in commit e78d1d6d4.

  2. Avoid leakage of zero-length arrays in partition_bounds_copy().

  3. Fix MemoryContextAllocAligned's interaction with Valgrind.

  4. Fix assorted pretty-trivial memory leaks in the backend.

  5. Improve our support for Valgrind's leak tracking.

  6. Reduce leakage during PL/pgSQL function compilation.

  7. Silence Valgrind leakage complaints in more-or-less-hackish ways.

  8. Silence complaints about leaks in PlanCacheComputeResultDesc.

  9. Suppress complaints about leaks in TS dictionary loading.

  10. Suppress complaints about leaks in function cache loading.

  11. Fix per-relation memory leakage in autovacuum.

  12. Fix AlignedAllocRealloc to cope sanely with OOM.