Having problems debugging drmemory

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Pastori

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Sep 27, 2025, 10:35:00 PM (14 hours ago) Sep 27
to Dr. Memory Users
I was trying to work on a specific issue in drmemory and wanted to make sure all the tests pass and the application doesn't crash, then when i tested the drmemory debug build on a regular hello world program, i was surprised that i encounter several SIGSEGV, SIGBUS and SIGILL faults, and although you can step over these, the breakpoints i set specifically in the report_summary (which always seems to run regardless), don't actually hit although the logging is clearly there, i have tried several different ways to mitigate this problem tried different gcc/g++ versions, different glibc versions, different system libraries and images (in docker), and tried to install system libraries with debug symbols and still encounter the same problem, i hope someone can tell me what am i doing wrong. This might have to do with vma coalescing but for now i can only guess. Now i really wanna know is this actually expected or not because i think dr might be handling these signals internally.
details:

os: arch-linux
kernel: 6.12.44-1-lts
cpu architecture: x86_64
docker images: ubuntu (16.04, 20.04, 22.04)




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Derek Bruening

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Sep 27, 2025, 10:40:10 PM (14 hours ago) Sep 27
to drmemor...@googlegroups.com
Dr. Memory is built on DynamoRIO which uses signals for various purposes: https://dynamorio.org/page_debugging.html#autotoc_md142
Application code is not executed from its original location.  https://dynamorio.org/page_debugging.html#autotoc_md139 suggests "Use read watchpoints instead of breakpoints in application code".
(Ideally there would be debugger augmentation to make things easier but that does not exist at this time.)

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Pastori

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8:38 AM (4 hours ago) 8:38 AM
to drmemor...@googlegroups.com
Thank you for the quick reply and clarification with the links, i guess i can safely ignore the signals, however i am trying to debug the drmemory build in itself, I actually set the breakpoints in the drmemory internal functions not in the application code which in this case is a hello world program (it's just a placeholder), do you mean that I should use watchpoints while debugging drmemory as well ?

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