Find out memory leaks in a shared library between dlopen and dlclose

Question

We write a shared library(say slib.so) which is dlopen'ed, used and dlclose'd in a never-ending executable. I want to check for memory leaks in the library slib.so without attaching the executable.

Is there any tool in Linux to find out the memory leaks in a shared library? So I need a tool which monitors the heap between dlopen and dlclose and report the issues after dlclose.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 29 '18 at 15:58

0

I need a tool which monitors the heap between dlopen and dlclose and report the issues after dlclose.

Any of the standard leak detection tools will work: Valgrind, Leak Sanitizer, TCMalloc heap checker, etc.

All you need to do is write a trivial executable wrapper, something like:

#include <dlfcn.h>

int main()
{
  for (int j = 0; j < 10; j++) {
    void *h = dlopen("libslib.so", RTLD_NOW);
    // optionally exercise the library here.
    dlclose(h);
  }
}

answered Oct 29 '18 at 15:58

Employed Russian

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Thanks for the reply! This takes a lot of time as our executable does so much of things before calling our library. – Srikanth Oct 30 '18 at 08:38
@Srikanth That's why you create a *separate* trivial executable to just exercise the library. – Employed Russian Oct 30 '18 at 13:57

Find out memory leaks in a shared library between dlopen and dlclose

1 Answers1