Detecting memory leak via VMM

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2010

Abstract

In this paper, virtualization technology is utilized to transparently record the allocation and release of memory resources applied by applications running on virtual machine (VM), and these records provide the auxiliary information to detect memory leaks hiding in the binary code. Firstly, this mechanism does not require source code modification or recompilation; secondly, the performance overhead is very small, which makes it possible to build online memory leak detection and reporting mechanisms, free application developers from designing test suite and improve the chances of finding more memory leaks. Besides, memory leak detection based on the virtual environment also provides versatility without needing special hardware supports: not only user-mode application can be detected, but the operating system kernel; and both Linux and Windows are supported. Existing research cannot bring all of these features together. The experimental results show that the memory leak detection mechanism has a limited performance overhead which is less than 10%, and the information produced by the mechanism can help programmer to track out the possible memory leaks efficiently.

Publication Title

Jisuanji Xuebao/Chinese Journal of Computers

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