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Release Notes

Compute Sanitizer Release Notes.

1. Release Notes

Updates in 2024.1

  • Enable shared addressing support by default: removed option --hmm-support and replaced it with environment variable NV_COMPUTE_SANITIZER_SHARED_ADDRESSING_SUPPORT. See the environment variables documentation for more information.
  • Changed default value for option --target-processes to all
  • Added detection for cuda::barrier initialization race conditions in racecheck on Hopper.
  • Added support for initcheck API errors suppression.
  • Added memcheck support for cuMemPoolImportPointer.
  • Added support for CUDA green contexts.
  • Added support for CUDA graph device-side node update.
  • Fixed potential false positives with synccheck when using different cuda::barrier in a single warp.
  • Fixed potential false negatives with memcheck when using floating point atomics on Hopper.

Updates in 2023.3.1

  • Fixed error output for WGMMA instructions.

Updates in 2023.3

  • Added support for Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) and Address Translation Service (ATS). The feature is opt-in using the --hmm-support command-line option.
  • Added racecheck support for device graph launches.
  • Added the ability to suppress known issues using the --suppressions command-line option. See the suppressions documentation for more information.
  • Added support for external memory objects. This effectively adds support for Vulkan and D3D12 interop.
  • Added device backtrace support for WSL.
  • Improve PC offset output. It is now printed next to the function name to clarify it is an assembly offset within that function.
  • Several command-line options no longer require to explicitly specify "yes" or "no" when they are used.
  • Renamed the options --kernel-regex and --kernel-regex-exclude to --kernel-name and --kernel-name-exclude.
  • Added the regex filtering key to --kernel-name and --kernel-name-exclude.
  • Added new command-line option --racecheck-indirect-barrier-dependency to enable indirect cuda::barrier tracking in racecheck.
  • Added new command-line option --coredump-behavior to control the target application behavior after generating a GPU coredump.
  • Added new command-line option --detect-missing-module-unload to detect missing calls to the cuModuleUnload driver API.
  • Added new command-line option --preload-library to make the target application load a shared library before the injectiion libraries.
  • Fix initcheck false positive when memory loads are widened and include padding bytes.
  • Fix potential hang in racecheck and synccheck tools when the bar.arrive instruction is used.
  • Added patching API support for the setsmemsize instruction.
  • Added patching API support for __syncthreads() after the barrier is released.

Updates in 2023.2.1

  • Fixed potential racecheck hang on H100 when using thread block clusters.
  • Compute Sanitizer 2023.2.1 is incorrectly versioned as 2023.2.0 and need to be differentiated by its build ID 33053471.

Updates in 2023.2

  • Added support for CUDA device graph launches.
  • Added racecheck support for cluster entry and exit race detection for remote shared memory accesses. See the cluster entry and exit race detection documentation for more information.
  • Added support for CUDA lazy loading when device heap checking is enabled. Requires CUDA driver version 535 or newer.
  • Added support for tracking child processes launched with system() or posix_spawn(p) when using --target-processes all.
  • Added support for st.async and red.async instructions.
  • Improved support for partial warp synchronization using cooperative groups in racecheck.
  • Improved support for cuda::barrier::wait() on SM 9.x.
  • Added coredump support for Pascal architecture and multi-context applications.
  • Added support for OptiX 8.0.
  • Improved performance when using initcheck in OptiX applications in some cases. Using initcheck to track OptiX applications now requires the option --check-optix yes.

Updates in 2023.1.1

  • Fixed bug where memcheck would report out-of-bound accesses when loading user parameter values using a ternary operator.
  • Fixed potential crash when using leakcheck with applications using CUBLAS.
  • Fixed potential false positives when using synccheck or racecheck with applications using CUDA barriers.

Updates in 2023.1

  • Added racecheck support for distributed shared memory.
  • Extended stream-ordered race detection to cudaMemcpy APIs.
  • Added memcheck, synccheck and patching API support for warpgroup operations.
  • Added --coredump-name CLI option to set the coredump file name.
  • Added support for Unicode file paths.
  • Added support for OptiX 7.7.

Updates in 2022.4.1

  • Fixed bug where synccheck would incorrectly report illegal instructions for code using cluster.sync() and compiled with --device-debug
  • Fixed incorrect address reports in SanitizerCallbackMemcpyAsync in some specific cases, leading to potential invalid results in memcheck and racecheck.
  • Fixed potential hangs and invalid results with racecheck on OptiX applications.
  • Fixed potential crash or invalid results when using CUDA Lazy Module Loading with memcheck or initcheck if --check-device-heap is enabled. Lazy Module Loading will be automatically disabled in these cases.

Updates in 2022.4

  • Added support for __nv_aligned_device_malloc.
  • Added support for ldmatrix and stmatrix instructions.
  • Added support for cache control operations when using the --check-cache-control command-line option.
  • Added new command-line option --unused-memory-threshold to control the threshold for unused memory reports.
  • Improved support for CUDA pipeline memcpy-async related hazards in racecheck.

Updates in 2022.3

  • Added support for the NVIDIA GH100/SM 9.x GPU architecture.
  • Added support for the NVIDIA AD10x/SM 8.9 GPU architecture.
  • Added support for lazy kernel loading.
  • Added memcheck support for distributed shared memory.
  • Added new options --num-callers-device and --num-callers-host to control the number of callers to print in stack traces.
  • Added support for OptiX 7.6 applications.
  • Fix bug on Linux ppc64le where the host stack trace was incomplete.

Updates in 2022.2.1

  • Fixed incorrect device backtrace for applications compiled with -lineinfo.

Updates in 2022.2

  • Added memcheck support for use-before-alloc and use-after-free race detection. See the stream-ordered race detection documentation for more information.
  • Added leakcheck support for asynchronous allocations, OptiX resources and CUDA memmap (on Linux only for the latter).
  • Added option to ignore CUDA_ERROR_NOT_FOUND error codes returned by the cuGetProcAddress API.
  • Added new sanitizer API functions to allocate and free page-locked host memory.
  • Added sanitizer API callbacks for the event management API.

Updates in 2022.1.1

  • Fixed initcheck issue where the tool would incorrectly abort a CUDA kernel launch after reporting an uninitialized access on Windows with hardware scheduling enabled.

Updates in 2022.1

  • Added support for generating coredumps.
  • Improved support for stack overflow detection.
  • Added new option --target-processes-filter to filter the processes being tracked by name.
  • Added initcheck support for asynchronous allocations. Requires CUDA driver version 510 or newer.
  • Added initcheck support for accesses on peer devices. Requires CUDA driver version 510 or newer.
  • Added support for OptiX 7 applications.
  • Added support for tracking the child processes of 32-bit processes in multi-process applications on Linux and Windows x86_64.

Updates in 2021.3.1

  • Fixed intermittent issue on vGPU where synccheck would incorrectly detect divergent threads.
  • Fixed potential hang when tracking several graph launches.

Updates in 2021.3

  • Improved Linux host backtrace.
  • Removed requirement to call cudaDeviceReset() for accurate reporting of memory leaks and unused memory features.
  • Fixed synccheck potential hang when calling __syncthreads in divergent code paths on Volta GPUs or newer.
  • Added print of nearest allocation information for memcheck precise errors in global memory.
  • Added warning when calling device-side malloc with an empty size.
  • Added separate sanitizer API device callback for cuda::memcpy_async.
  • Added new command-line option --num-cuda-barriers to override the expected number of cuda::barrier used by the target application.
  • Added new command-line options --print-session-details to print session information and --save-session-details to save it to the output file.
  • Added support for WSL2.

Updates in 2021.2.3

  • Enabled SLS hardening and branch protection for L4T builds.

Updates in 2021.2.2

  • Enabled stack canaries with random canary values for L4T builds.

Updates in 2021.2.1

  • Added device backtrace for malloc/free errors in CUDA kernels.
  • Improved racecheck host memory footprint.

Updates in 2021.2

  • Added racecheck and synccheck support for cuda::barrier on Ampere GPUs or newer.
  • Added racecheck support for __syncwarp with partial mask.
  • Added --launch-count and --launch-skip filtering options. See the Command Line Options documentation for more information.
  • --filter and --exclude options have been respectively renamed to --kernel-regex and --kernel-regex-exclude.
  • Added support for QNX and Linux aarch64 platforms.
  • Added support for CUDA graphs memory nodes.

Updates in 2021.1.1

  • Fixed an issue where incorrect line numbers could be shown in errors reports.

Updates in 2021.1

Updates in 2020.3.1

  • Fixed issue when launching a CUDA graph multiple times.
  • Fixed false positives when using cooperative groups synchronization primitives with initcheck and synccheck.

Updates in 2020.3

  • Added support for CUDA memory pools and CUDA API reduced serialization.
  • Added host backtrace for unused memory reports.

Updates in 2020.2.1

  • Fixed crash when loading cubins of size larger than 2 GiB.
  • Fixed error detection on systems with multiple GPUs.
  • Fixed issue when using CUDA Virtual Memory Management API cuMemSetAccess to remove access to a subset of devices on a system with multiple GPUs.
  • Added sanitizer API to translate between sanitizer and CUDA stream handles.

Updates in 2020.2

  • Added support for CUDA graphs and CUDA memmap APIs.
  • The memory access callback of the sanitizer API has been split into three distinct callbacks corresponding to global, shared and local memory accesses.

Updates in 2020.1.2

  • Added sanitizer stream API. This fixes tool crashes when per-thread streams are being used.

Updates in 2020.1.1

  • Added support for Windows Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling
  • Added support for tracking child processes spawned by the application launched under the tool via the --target-processes CLI option.

Updates in 2020.1

  • Initial release of the Compute Sanitizer (with CUDA 11.0)

Updates to the Sanitizer API :

  • Added support for per-thread streams
  • Added APIs to retrieve the PC and size of a CUDA function or patch
  • Added callback for cudaStreamAttachMemAsync
  • Added direction to memcpy callback data
  • Added stream to memcpy and memset callbacks data
  • Added launch callback after syscall setup
  • Added visibility field to allocation callback data
  • Added PC argument to block entry callback
  • Added incoming value to memory access callbacks
  • Added threadCount to barrier callbacks
  • Added cooperative group flags for barrier and function callbacks

Updates in 2019.1

  • Initial release of the Compute Sanitizer API (with CUDA 10.1)

2. Known Limitations

  • Applications run much slower under the Compute Sanitizer tools. This may cause some kernel launches to fail with a launch timeout error when running with the Compute Sanitizer enabled.
  • Compute Sanitizer tools do not support device backtrace on Maxwell devices (SM 5.x).
  • Compute Sanitizer tools do not support coredumps on WSL2.
  • The memcheck tool does not support CUDA API error checking for API calls made on the GPU using dynamic parallelism.
  • The racecheck, synccheck and initcheck tools do not support CUDA dynamic parallelism.
  • CUDA dynamic parallelism is not supported when Windows Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling is enabled.
  • Compute Sanitizer tools cannot interoperate with other CUDA developer tools. This includes CUDA coredumps which are automatically disabled by the Compute Sanitizer. They can be enabled instead by using the --generate-coredump option.
  • The initcheck tool does not support IPC allocations. Using it will result in false positives.
  • Compute Sanitizer tools are not supported when SLI is enabled.

3. Known Issues

  • The racecheck tool may print incorrect data for "Current value" when reporting a hazard on a shared memory location where the last access was an atomic operation. This can also impact the severity of this hazard.
  • On QNX, when using the --target-processes all option, analyzing shell scripts may hang after the script has completed. End the application using Ctrl-C on the command line in that case.
  • The initcheck tool might report false positives for device-to-host cudaMemcpy operations on padded structs that were initialized by a CUDA kernel. The #pragma pack directive can be used to disable the padding as a workaround.
  • When a hardware exception occur during a kernel launch that was skipped due to the usage of the kernel-name, kernel-name-exclude, launch-count or launch-skip options, the memcheck tool will not be able to report additional details as an imprecise error.
  • The leakcheck feature is disabled under Confidential Computing.

4. Support

Information on supported platforms and GPUs.

4.1. Platform Support

Table 1. Platforms supported by Compute Sanitizer
Platform Support
Windows Yes
Linux (x86_64) Yes
Linux (ppc64le) Yes
Linux (aarch64sbsa) Yes
Linux (aarch64) Yes
QNX Yes
MacOSX No

4.2. GPU Support

The compute-sanitizer tools are supported on all CUDA capable GPUs with SM versions 5.0 and above.

Notices

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