Software Alternatives & Reviews

SystemTap VS Valgrind

Compare SystemTap VS Valgrind and see what are their differences

SystemTap logo SystemTap

SystemTap provides instrumentation for a live running kernel and user-space applications.

Valgrind logo Valgrind

Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools.
  • SystemTap Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-05-11
  • Valgrind Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-15

SystemTap videos

Product Overviews: Using Systemtap

More videos:

  • Review - RHEL Developers: RHEL SystemTap Overview
  • Review - What is my system doing - Full System Observability with SystemTap

Valgrind videos

Detecting Memory Leaks With Valgrind

More videos:

  • Review - Finding memory errors with Valgrind
  • Review - sparcv9 New architecture to be supported by Valgrind

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to SystemTap and Valgrind)
OS & Utilities
36 36%
64% 64
IDE
24 24%
76% 76
Software Development
20 20%
80% 80
Resource Profiling And Monitoring

User comments

Share your experience with using SystemTap and Valgrind. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Valgrind seems to be a lot more popular than SystemTap. While we know about 36 links to Valgrind, we've tracked only 3 mentions of SystemTap. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

SystemTap mentions (3)

  • What are some tools to create code diagrams/graphs/(static or dynamic) call graphs when analyzing c++ code? Any level of automation would be useful here, but manual editing is also preferred. I see Visual Studio Code Graph but this is an option for Windows mainly. Doxygen, perftools?
    Eclipse seems to have a Callgraph plug-in (for execution traces), although it is based on SystemTap, which is only for Linux. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Valve Did the IMPOSSIBLE... Anti-Cheat on Linux - WAN Show September 24, 2021
    They can use DKMS or their own version of systemtap so not they don't have to release the code. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Frozenbyte are now telling Linux users to use Proton, even for their older games
    Since these are kernel anticheats I don't know how they're going to make it work though. Maybe BE and EAC will ship signed code that Valve lets run outside of the Win32 environment, possibly just as the root user or with their own version of systemtap to get into the kernel. Source: almost 3 years ago

Valgrind mentions (36)

  • Memory Safe or Bust?
    Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment [CI/CD] pipelines play a crucial role in enforcing code quality, especially when working with memory-unsafe languages. By integrating automated dynamic analysis tools like Valgrind or AddressSanitizer, static analysis tools like Clang Static Analyzer or cppcheck, and manual code review processes, developers can identify and mitigate many memory-related... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Top 7 C++ Tools to explore in 2024 if it's not already the case.
    Valgrind is an open-source tool designed to help developers identify memory management issues, memory leaks, and various other types of memory-related errors in their programs. It's commonly used for debugging and profiling purposes, particularly in C and C++ development. Here's an overview of Valgrind:. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Debugging OpenGL with GDB causes shader issues
    Valgrind is a tool for debugging memory errors. We have it installed on our linux machines at work. I'm not sure how difficult this is to install and setup. You can find more info here: https://valgrind.org/. Source: 5 months ago
  • Ask HN: Good practices for my first C project
    It's often best not to think too much about "aesthetic", or performance, at first, and to focus instead on getting something that works, correctly. FWIW, The Mythical Man-Month[0] recommends to start with a few throw-away prototypes, during which you're gaining expertise over the problem, that you can later crystallize in more definite versions. Now, it doesn't mean good practices should be discarded... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • C++ is everywhere, but noone really talks about it. What are people's thoughts?
    I think you're on the right path, yes. Usually I use Valgrind for all memory related debugging, not sure if it can help you here. Source: 10 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SystemTap and Valgrind, you can also consider the following products

ftrace - A function tracer for the Linux kernel.

API Monitor - API Monitor is a software that monitors and displays API calls made by applications and services. Its a powerful tool for seeing how Windows and other applications work or tracking down problems that you have in your own applications

perf - Perf is a simple app monitoring solution paired with meaningful alerts.

Kcachegrind - Callgrind is a profiling tool and KCachegrind is able to visualize output of the profilers.

strace - Trace system calls and signals. A diagnostic, debugging and instructional userspace utility.

ktap - A script-based dynamic tracing tool for Linux.