chap analyzes un-instrumented ELF core files for leaks, memory growth, and corruption. It is sufficiently reliable that it can be used in automation to catch leaks before they are committed. As an interactive tool, it helps explain memory growth, can identify some forms of corruption, and supplements a debugger by giving the status of various memory locations.

chap currently supports only glibc malloc. It does not support jemalloc or tcmalloc.

Traditionally, memory analysis for C and C++ requires instrumentation. However, if an incident occurs using code that was not instrumented it may not be practical to reproduce the problem. For example, it may have been due to a rare execution path, or resources required for the reproduction setup may not be available. Instrumentation may also distort timing enough that it is not practical to run on a regular basis, or it may be incomplete and report false leaks.

chap is distributed as source, so first build it (on 64-bit Linux):

$ git clone https://github.com/vmware/chap.git
$ cd chap
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ mkdir build-chap
$ cd build-chap
$ cmake ../
$ make
$ ./chap
Usage: chap [-t] <file>

-t means to just do truncation check then stop
   0 exit code means no truncation was found

Supported file types include the following:

64-bit little-endian ELF core file
32-bit little-endian ELF core file

If that doesn't work out of the box, see CONTRIBUTING.md for pre-requisites and other details.

chap has REPL support for command history and tab completion using the replxx library.

Once built, here's a trivial example of an interactive session:

$ echo "int main() { new int; new int; *(int *)0 = 1; return 0; }" | g++ -xc++ -
$ ulimit -c unlimited
$ ./a.out
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$ ./chap `ls -t core.* | head -1`
> summarize leaked
Unsigned allocations have 1 instances taking 0x18(24) bytes.
   Unsigned allocations of size 0x18 have 1 instances taking 0x18(24) bytes.
1 allocations use 0x18 (24) bytes.
> enumerate allocations /size 18
13f5010
13f5030
> explain 13f5010
Address 13f5010 is at offset 0x0 in a used allocation at 13f5010 of size 0x18
This allocation appears to be leaked.
This allocation appears to be unreferenced.
> explain 13f5030
Address 13f5030 is at offset 0x0 in a used allocation at 13f5030 of size 0x18
This allocation appears to be anchored.
Allocation at 13f5030 appears to be directly anchored from at least one register.
Register rcx for thread 1 references 13f5030
>

For more information on how to use chap, please see the built-in help and the USERGUIDE.md.

The best way to communicate with the maintainers is via the GitHub issue tracker.

We welcome contributions from the community. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

If you wish to contribute code and you have not signed our contributor license agreement (CLA). Our bot will update the issue when you open a pull request. For any questions about the CLA process, please refer to our FAQ.

chap is available under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2. Please see LICENSE.txt.