Debugging Clearwater with GDB and Valgrind

Valgrind

Valgrind is a very powerful profiling and debugging tool.

Before you run Bono or Sprout under valgrind, you may want to tweak pjsip’s code slightly as indicated below, then rebuild and patch your nodes.

  • Valgrind’s memory access tracking hooks into malloc and free. Unfortunately, pjsip uses its own memory management functions, and so mallocs/frees relatively rarely. To disable this, modify pjlib/src/pj/pool_caching.c‘s pj_caching_pool_init function to always set cp->max_capacity to 0.
  • Valgrind’s thread safety tool (helgrind) tracks the order in which locks are taken, and reports on any lock cycles (which can in theory cause deadlocks). One of these locks generates a lot of benign results. To prevent these edit pjsip\include\pjsip\sip_config.h and set the value of PJSIP_SAFE_MODULE to 0.
  • Valgrind’s thread safety tool also spots variables that are accessed on mutliple threads without locking the locking necessary to prevent race conditions. Pjsip’s memory pools maintain some statistics that are not used by Clearwater, but that trip valgrind’s race condition detection. To suppress this edit pjlib/src/pj/pool_caching.c and remove the bodies of the cpool_on_block_alloc and cpool_on_block_free (keeping only the bodies).

To run Bono, Sprout or Homestead under valgrind (the example commands assume you are running sprout), the easiest way is to:

  • Find the command line you are using to run Sprout (ps -eaf | grep sprout)
  • Make sure valgrind is installed on your system and you have the appropriate debug packages installed (sudo apt-get install valgrind and sudo apt-get install sprout-dbg)
  • Disable monitoring of sprout (sudo monit unmonitor -g sprout)
  • Stop sprout (sudo service sprout stop)
  • Allow child processes to use more file descriptors, and become the sprout user (sudo -i; ulimit -Hn 1000000; ulimit -Sn 1000000; (sudo -u sprout bash);)
  • Change to the /etc/clearwater directory
  • Set up the library path (export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/share/clearwater/sprout/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH)
  • Run the executable under valgrind, enabling the appropriate valgrind options - for example, to use massif to monitor the Sprout heap valgrind --tools=massif --massif-out-file=/var/log/sprout/massif.out.%p /usr/share/clearwater/bin/sprout <parameters> (the –massif-out-file option is required to ensure the output is written to a directory where the sprout user has write permission). If any of Sprout parameters include a semi-colon, you must prefix this with a backslash otherwise the bash interpreter will interpret this as the end of the command.

Valgrind will slow down the running of Bono, Sprout and Homestead by a factor of 5-10. It will produce output when it detects invalid/illegal memory access - often these turn out to be benign, but they’re rarely spurious.

GDB

Installing

To install gdb, simply type sudo apt-get install gdb. gdb is already installed on build machines, but not on live nodes.

If you’re debugging on a live node, it’s also worth installing the sprout or bono debug packages. When we build the standard (release) versions, we strip all the symbols out and these are saved off separately in the debug package. Note that you will still be running the release code - the debug symbols will just be loaded by gdb when you start it up. To install these packages, type sudo apt-get install sprout-dbg or sudo apt-get install bono-dbg.