Automatically Valgrinding code with AX_VALGRIND_CHECK

tl;dr: For `make check` with Valgrind support, add AX_VALGRIND_CHECK to configure.ac and @VALGRIND_CHECK_RULES@ to tests/Makefile.am. Use memcheck, helgrind, drd and sgcheck.

Once you’ve written a unit test suite with near-100% coverage, you can validate software with a lot more confidence than before, since any effort you put into validation is working across the whole code base. ((Normal caveats about the combinatorial complexity of dynamic testing apply.)) It’s quite common to check for memory leaks with Valgrind’s memcheck tool — but Valgrind has several additional tools which are useful in production: helgrind, drd and sgcheck. ((Although currently the threading tools may not work with GLib threads, due to its use of futexes rather than pthreads.)) All of these can be run over unit tests.

How can you run a test suite under these tools? The normal method is some kind of hard-to-remember rune involving libtool, and either something about TESTS_ENVIRONMENT or some kind of LOG_COMPILER (but why would I want to compile my test logs?). For that reason, I’ve written an autoconf macro which abstracts it all a bit: AX_VALGRIND_CHECK. It adds a check-valgrind target to your makefile which handles running the `make check` tests under all four Valgrind tools of interest. Various ancillary variables (such as VALGRIND_SUPPRESSIONS_FILES or VALGRIND_FLAGS) allow the Valgrind options to be changed. `make check-valgrind` will return an error exit code if any problems are found, with the idea that the target can be used for automated testing and continuous integration.

To use it, either add a dependency on autoconf-archive to your project, or copy the ax_valgrind_check.m4 macro in-tree (and add it to EXTRA_DIST), then follow the instructions at the top of the file for adding it to configure.ac and tests/Makefile.am.

With this macro, I’ve tried to bring together existing makefile snippets which exist in various projects to produce one macro which can be reused everywhere. Of course, I’ve probably missed something – some feature or specific use case which someone has – so if anyone has any suggestions for improvement, please let me know or submit a patch to the autoconf-archive! For example, at the moment the macro requires automake’s parallel test harness, and does not support older versions of automake.

Thanks to my employer, Collabora, for enabling me to work on (hopefully useful) stuff like this!

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