Debugging Dynamic Memory Usage Errors Using NonStop Native Inspect White Paper

Introduction

HP NonStop Debugger (Native Inspect) is an HP-supported implementation of the open source

debugger GDB. In addition to the normal debugging functions, it also enables you to debug

memory-related errors in a program.

Native Inspect supports memory-debugging (using Run Time Checking (RTC)) of source-level

programs written in HP NonStop C and HP NonStop C++ on Itanium®-based systems running the

NonStop Guardian or OSS operating systems.

Native Inspect offers the following memory-debugging capabilities:

• Reports memory leaks.

• Reports heap allocation profiles.

• Stops program execution if bad writes occur with string operations such as strcpy(),and

memcpy().

• Stops program execution when freeing unallocated or deallocated blocks.

• Stops program execution when freeing a block if bad writes occur outside block boundary.

• Stops program execution conditionally based on whether a specified block address is allocated

or de-allocated.

Intended Audience

This document is intended for C and C++ programmers who use NonStop Native Inspect debugger

to detect and debug memory-related errors. The reader of this document must be familiar with the

basic commands supported by Native Inspect.

Typographic Conventions

This document uses the following typographical conventions:

A colon represents the system prompt for OSS.:

A right arrow represents a prompt in TACL on Guardian.>

A command name or qualified command phrase.Command

Text displayed by the computer.Computer output

The name of an environment variable, for example,PATH.ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE

The name of an error, usually returned in the

errnovariable.

[ERROR NAME]

The name of a placeholder in a command, function, or

other syntax display that you replace with an actual value.

Variable

The contents are optional in syntax. If the contents are a

list separated by |,you must choose one of the items.

< >

Separates items in a list of choices.|

This alert provides essential information to explain a

concept or to complete a task.

IMPORTANT

A note contains additional information to emphasize or

supplement important points of the main text.

NOTE

Related Information

The NonStop C runtime library defines several functions useful in detecting memory-related problems.

These functions are not part of the memory leak detection functionality in the debugger. The function