Rational Purify 4.5 IRIX6

Contents

• Changes from previous releases
• Supported systems
  • Operating system and Hardware
  • Compilers
  • Debuggers
  • Threads
• Restrictions and known issues
• User Interface
• Compilers
• Debuggers
• Purify'ing X Applications
• Threads
• Unsupported Features
• Misleading Error Messages
• Purify Swap Usage
• How do I use the API functions?
• Manual Examples

New in This Release

• Bug fixes and compatibility with OS patches.
• Support for Irix 6.5.x and the 7.2.1 compilers
• Support for applications using POSIX threads on Irix 6.5.x. Pthread support is not available for versions of Irix prior to 6.5. Please read the Restrictions for important related IRIX patch information.
• More aggressive checking of optimized N32 code has been implemented. This can lead to more UMR's. See the option -purify-ignore-n32-o-umr=yes in the Restrictions section for information on how to disable this behavior.
• This is the last release to support Irix 5.x

New In Purify 4.1

• ClearCase integration
  
  Three new icons have been added to allow the user to check out and check in source files within a source code repository. Each button is associated with a script to execute the appropriate command for retrieving or storing a source file. The default source repository is ClearCase but the scripts can be tailored to other systems, including RCS and SCCS.
• Purela query script
  
  This release contains a new utility, purela_show, which generates simplified reports from license and usage data maintained in a standard or aggregate PureLA database.

Operating system and Hardware

• Purify has been tested with IRIX versions 5.3, 6.2 and 6.5.
• NOTE: This is the last release of Purify to support IRIX 5.x.

Purify has been tested with the following compilers:

• cc
• CC
• f77
• gcc

Debuggers

• dbx, version 6.1 or better
• cvd, the Workshop Debugger, version 2.5 or better.

See the "Restrictions and Known Issues" section for more details.

Threads

Purify supports these threads packages:

• the sproc interface.
• POSIX threads.

Restrictions and Known Issues

User Interface

• If a large number of items are selected, "Expand all" followed by "Collapse all" can crash some unpatched versions of the OpenWindows 3.0 server. This occurs if you are displaying on a SUN workstation.
• If you expand or collapse messages while the "Continue" or "Reset etc. Continue" buttons are displayed, the buttons may subsequently be incorrectly positioned.
• The "Edit" toolbar item may be slow to respond.
• The Purify GUI menus and buttons become inaccessible if either the NumLock or ScrollLock key is activated. The workaround is to switch them off, or add the following line(s) to your $HOME/.Xdefaults file.
  
  

  ! Ignore the NumLock and ScrollLock keys on
  ! mouse buttons
  Purify*ignoreModifierMask: Mod3|Mod2

  This second workaround will take effect for a new Purify viewer after you restart your X-session or run a command like 'xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xdefaults'.

• The "Invoke ClearDDTS" Button has been modified to bring up the ClearQuest web interface. This feature only works with Netscape Navigator.
  
  

  The site-wide URL for ClearQuest can be given during installation or set by manually editting the file

  pure_clearquest_url

  in your Purify home directory. A user can override the site-wide URL by setting the environment variable

  PURE_CLEARQUEST_URL

  This feature is partly implemented by a shell script, ("pure_invoke_clearquest" in your Purify home directory) to allow you to tailor its operation to your needs. If you wish, you may copy and customize this script. As long as the directory containing the script appears in your search path before your Purify home directory, it will be used instead of the original script

  If you prefer to use Purify with ClearDDTS, you can do so by setting the X resource

  Purify*ddtsCommandString

  to 'xddts', if xddts is in your search path, or to the full path to your xddts executable. xddts is invoked by a shell script ("pure_invoke_ddts" in your Purify home directory). If you wish to customize it, please read the section on customizing "pure_invoke_clearquest" above.

  If you already have a customized "pure_invoke_ddts" script in your search path, All you need to do is set your X resource as described above, and Purify will find your customized script automatically.

  The following copyright applies to portions of this ClearQuest integration code:

  Copyright 1996 Netscape Communications Corporation, all rights reserved. Created: Jamie Zawinski jwz@netscape.com, 24-Dec-94. Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

• The GNU gcc extensions are not tested against Purify. Most gcc extensions will probably work fine. Known limitations at present include problems with nested functions (e.g.: making a pointer to a nested function and attempting to call through it will not work).
• Aggressive Loading
  • - Some compilers load data from memory but ignore the data that has been read, especially when optimization is turned on. Purify will signal a UMR if the loaded data is uninitialized. In some sense this is a false error report because the uninitialized data will not affect your program.

• When running a Purify'd X application, there is a potential for deadlock if your application causes Purify to generate a message while the application is holding the X lock, since Purify will be unable to generate the message, and the application is blocked until the message is delivered.

  To avoid this kind of problem, you should run your application on a different X server than the Purify UI or Purify stderr output, or you should use the -log-file= or -view-file= options to specify a file to capture messages for inspection after your application is finished.

  A convenient way to debug on two displays is to pre-start the Purify Viewer on one display ("slave"), and then start the application on the other display ("master"):

          % purify -display slave:0 -view a.out.X & 
          % a.out.X -display master:0
  
  

  The two commands must be executed on the same computer, but it could be the workstation associated with either display, or altogether another computer remote from both displays. The application will connect to the already started Purify Viewer, and messages will not conflict with the X display interactions of the application under test.

Debuggers

• Invoking a debugger on a core file generated by a purified program, will cause numerous "mismatch" messages to be printed. These can be ignored, and will not affect debugging.

• Call chains describing when memory was malloced or freed do not always include the thread id.
• The Purify API functions purify_map_pool() and purify_map_pool_id() are not MT safe.
• For applications using Pthreads, the purified program may crash or hang if dlopen is called.
  

  This is a bug in rld. SGI is releasing a patch (#3910) to correct the problem; please contact SGI Support to obtain the patch.

  If the patch is not yet available from SGI, please contact Rational Support to obtain an an iterim, unofficial patch.

  Note that your application may not use dlopen directly, but a library it is using may call dlopen. C++ exception handling may also call dlopen.

• Customers using unsupported threads packages should contact Rational Software technical support (support@rational.com) to ensure compatibility.

• SBR and SBW errors are not reported on IRIX.
• The Initialized Data and BSS sections are not checked for ABR and ABW errors on IRIX
• Statically linked mallocs are ignored: users who implement their own malloc function must put it in a DSO.
• Corded executables or shared libraries will execute correctly when purified. However, the debugger or the disassembler will show inaccurate line numbers and function name. It should be noted that libc.so on 6.5.x is shipped corded; that means a purified executable will have trouble debugging while inside libc.
• N64 binaries are not supported.
• Instrumentation of stripped binaries and shared libraries is not supported.

• A failure to write to disk may result in a message like:
  
  #Error: (system) No such file or directory, write() failed [a.out].
  In this case, you can see that you are out of disk space with "df .", and you should clean up or otherwise acquire more disk space.
• More aggressive UMR checking has been added. This may cause spurious UMR's in some optimized n32 code. To disable this aggressive checking, use the option:
  

  purify-ignore-n32-o-umr=yes

  or set the environment variable:

  PURIFY_IGNORE_N32_O_UMR

• A Purify'd application needs more swap space than the equivalent unpurify'd version. Running under a debugger, you will need even more. To add swap space you may do the following:

Do the following as root to add a 40MB swap file:

/usr/sbin/mkfile 40m /usr/swap

Add this line to /etc/fstab: /usr/swap swap swap pri=3 0 0

Then execute:

/etc/init.d/swap stop
/etc/init.d/swap start

You may also allocate virtual swap to appease the debuggers swap requirements. Check the man page (man swapctl) for caveats.

Do the following as root:

vi /etc/config/vswap.options
>change vswaplen to 250000

/sbin/chkconfig vswap on
/etc/init.d/swap stop
/etc/init.d/swap start

There are stubs for the Purify API functions in the files libpurify_stubs.so and libpurify_stubs.a. For the N32 ABI, the files are libpurify_stubs_n32.so and purify_stubs_n32.a. You use the .so during development, and the .a for shipping your product. If you link with the .a file, the Purify API functions will be stubbed out even if you subsequently Purify your program.

The examples in Chapter 12 of the manual are intended to help the user understand the circumstances that would cause Purify to report what it reports. At least one example does not apply to Purify on IRIX.

• - The MSE example in Chapter 12 will not produce an MSE on IRIX.