Release notes for Rational Purify 4.6 IRIX 6.2, 6.5

ASCII Text version

Table of Contents

• Changes from previous releases
• Supported systems
• Restrictions and known issues

Changes from previous releases

New in This Release

• Bug fixes and compatibility with OS patches.

• This release uses a new FlexLm based licensing. Read the new installation guide before installing the product. Use rs_install instead of pure_install for the installation.

• IRIX 5.x is no longer supported.

New in Purify 4.5

• 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 -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

Supported systems

Operating system and Hardware

Purify has been tested with IRIX versions 6.2 and 6.5.

Compilers

Purify has been tested with the following compilers:

• cc
• CC
• f77

Debuggers

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

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.

Compilers

• 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.

Purify'ing X Applications

• 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.

Threads

• 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.

• For systems running IRIX 6.5.7f or higher, Purify may fail to instrument /usr/lib/libc.so with the error message

  		Processing /usr/lib/libc.so.1 -- error fatal:
  		  Jump registered out of no transformed block
  		  [SA906D8, SA90710] /usr/lib/libc.so.1
  

  This is a bug in cord. libc.so is corded, but cord is not updating the notransform information in the shared library correctly.

  This does not happen with Irix versions below 6.5.7, or with version on the maintenance stream (e.g. 6.5.7m).

  Rational Support is working with SGI to make a patch available. Please contact Rational Support regarding availability of the patch.

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

Unsupported Features

• 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.

Misleading Error Messages

• 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:

   -ignore-n32-o-umr=yes
  

  or set the environment variable:

         PURIFY_IGNORE_N32_O_UMR
  

Purify Swap Usage

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

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

How do I use the API functions?

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.

Manual Examples

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.