To use this tool, you must specify
--tool=lackey
on the Valgrind
command line.
Lackey is a simple Valgrind tool that does some basic program measurement. It adds quite a lot of simple instrumentation to the program's code. It is primarily intended to be of use as an example tool.
It measures and reports:
The number of calls to
_dl_runtime_resolve()
, the
function in glibc's dynamic linker that resolves function
references to shared objects.
You can change the name of the function with command line
option --fnname=<name>
.
The number of conditional branches encountered and the number and proportion of those taken.
Statistics about the amount of work done during the execution of the client program:
The number of basic blocks entered and completed by the program. Note that due to optimisations done by the JIT, this is not really an accurate value.
The number of guest (x86, amd64, ppc, etc.) instructions and IR statements executed. IR is Valgrind's RISC-like intermediate representation via which all instrumentation is done.
Ratios between some of these counts.
When command line option
--detailed-counts=yes
is
specified, a table is printed with counts of loads, stores and ALU
operations for various types of operands.
The types are identified by their IR name ("I1" ... "I128", "F32", "F64", and "V128").
The exit code of the client program.
Note that Lackey runs quite slowly, especially when
--detailed-counts=yes
is specified.
It could be made to run a lot faster by doing a slightly more
sophisticated job of the instrumentation, but that would undermine
its role as a simple example tool. Hence we have chosen not to do
so.