How to run heaptrack against gnome-shell?

Desktop
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F31, gnome-shell 3.34.3

I am experiencing a memory leek with gnome-shell and therefore want to run heaptrack against gnome-shell. Unfortunately, this does not work for me (heaptrack works perfectly fine with all other applications). Things I have tried:

  • heaptrack -p $(pidof gnome-shell) → Results in ptrace: Operation not permitted., even though /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope is 0. Furthermore, I tried setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /usr/bin/gdb, which does not work under Fedora as /usr/bin/gdb is actually a symbolic link to /usr/libexec/gdb. So I did, setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /usr/libexec/gdb, but I still get ptrace: Operation not permitted.

  • sudo heaptrack -p $(pidof gnome-shell) → Results in ERROR: failed to open heaptrack output file /tmp/heaptrack_fifo36227: Permission denied (13) in the gnome-shell journal.

In both cases the heaptrack file has a size of 0 byte.
Does anyone have any ideas how this is supposed to work?

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Can anyone give me a pointer where to look for it at least?

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This is probably down to “setcap CAP_SYS_NICE=+ep” set on the gnome-shell binary, It’s known to have prevented ptrace in other situations. You can probably undo that for testing purposes.

I only tried heaptrack with gnome-shell from my jhbuild setup, but “heaptrack -p pidof gnome-shell” just worked for me (“CFLAGS=-g -O -fno-omit-frame-pointer” in my environment might also have something to do in backtrace correctness, but that’s an step ahead)

Cheers,
Carlos

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Thanks Carlos.

That was indeed the problem. After removing the capabilities the insertion of heaptrack worked perfectly fine.

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