Bug 390310

Created attachment 110555 [details]
Patch file

The XML output of valgrind does not contain the different summaries from the text format (namely the heap, leak and error summaries). In consequence, the creation of a digest of the results (for example for an external GUI) is more difficult. This question has apparently already been asked without answers (cf. e.g https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40902804/leak-summary-is-missing-from-valgrind-log-file) and the persons I asked actually parse the text output to create their digests. I haven't found a similar question in the bugtracker. 

I propose a patch (to apply to the master git branch) that adds these summaries into the XML output. As a result of the patch, it is possible to output to XML and simply test (for example) whether all heap blocks have been freed : 

valgrind --xml=yes --xml-file=res.xml some_executable_to_test

xmllint --xpath "string(/valgrindoutput/all_heap_blocks_freed/@val)" res.xml 

# -> outputs "true" of "false"

This patch impacts a minor part of valgrind (namely just the output). I tried to follow the coding standards from the source. I am willing to discuss the form of the output if necessary. For example, at the moment, I store the results inside attributes instead of the nodes themselves, and this can be changed. I tried to run the regression and performance tests, but they fail on my machine with or without the patch. 

Example of output in XML format : 
<heap_summary>
  <memory_in_use_at_exit bytes="48" in_blocks="3"/>
  <total_heap_usage allocs="4" frees="1" bytes_allocated="1,072"/>
</heap_summary>
<leak_summary>
  <definitely_lost bytes="48" in_blocks="3"/>
  <indirectly_lost bytes="0" in_blocks="0"/>
  <possibly_lost bytes="0" in_blocks="0"/>
  <still_reachable bytes="0" in_blocks="0"/>
  <suppressed bytes="0" in_blocks="0"/>
</leak_summary>
<error_summary errors="3" from="3" suppressed="0" suppressed_from="0"/>