Question

With Linux/GCC/C++, I’d like to record something to stderr whenever malloc/free/new/delete are called. I’m trying to understand a library’s memory allocations, and so I’d like to generate this output while I’m running unit tests. I use valgrind for mem leak detection, but I can’t find an option to make it just log allocations.

Any ideas? I’m looking for the simplest possible solution. Recompiling the library is not an option.

Answer 1

malloc_hook(3) allows you to globally interpose your own malloc function. (There’s __realloc_hook __free_hook etc. as well, I’ve just left them out for simplicity.)

#include <stdio.h>
#include <malloc.h>

static void *(*old_malloc_hook)(size_t, const void *);

static void *new_malloc_hook(size_t size, const void *caller) {
    void *mem;

    __malloc_hook = old_malloc_hook;
    mem = malloc(size);
    fprintf(stderr, "%p: malloc(%zu) = %p\n", caller, size, mem);
    __malloc_hook = new_malloc_hook;

    return mem;
}

static void init_my_hooks(void) {
    old_malloc_hook = __malloc_hook;
    __malloc_hook = new_malloc_hook;
}

void (*__malloc_initialize_hook)(void) = init_my_hooks;

$ cat >mem.c <<'EOF'
(the code above)
EOF
$ cc -fPIC -shared -o mem.so mem.c
$ LD_PRELOAD=./mem.so ls
0x7ffc14931adc: malloc(5) = 0xb40010
0x7ffc1492c6b0: malloc(120) = 0xb40030
0x7ffc1497f61a: malloc(12) = 0xb40010
0x7ffc1492be38: malloc(776) = 0xb400b0
…

printf might call malloc, which is why we undo the hook temporarily. Be careful of this if when you hook malloc in any way.