3.2 Getting Caller Address Information

Even though the allocation macros can provide file/line information for some of your code, there are still modules which either you can't include `dmalloc.h' (such as library routines) or you just don't want to. You can still get information about the routines that call dmalloc function from the return-address information. To accomplish this, you must be using this library on one of the supported architecture/compilers. See section Issues Important for Porting the Library.

The library attempts to use some assembly hacks to get the return-address or the address of the line that called the dmalloc function. If you have unfreed memory that does not have associated file and line information, you might see the following non-freed memory messages.

not freed: '0x38410' (22 bytes) from 'ra=0xdd2c'
not freed: '0x38600' (10232 bytes) from 'ra=0x10234d'
not freed: '0x38220' (137 bytes) from 'ra=0x82cc'

With the help of a debugger, these return-addresses (or ra) can then be identified. I've provided a `ra_info.pl' perl script in the `contrib/' directory with the dmalloc sources which seems to work well with gdb. You can also use manual methods for gdb to find the return-address location. See section Translating Return Addresses into Code Locations.

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