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Release Notes (PDF) - v2024.2.0 (older) - Last updated May 8, 2024 - Send Feedback

## Release Notes

Compute Sanitizer Release Notes.

Release notes and known issues.

## 1. Release Notes

### Updates in 2024.2

- Added public API and memcheck support for PTX cp.async.bulk operations from global to shared memory on Hopper.
- Added support for OptiX 8.1.
- Dropped support for Linux ppc64le: this platform is no longer supported.
- Fixed an issue where memcheck would report misaligned or out of bounds false positives with accesses of a larger size than the actual operation in specific cases.
- Fixed potential issues when using Heterogeneous Memory Management.
- Fixed potential crashes or false results in racecheck when using clusters on Hopper.
- Added a warning when clearing unsupported coredump-related environment variables.
- Clarified in documentation when leak errors are reported.

### Updates in 2024.1.1

- Fixed an issue where errors would not be reported in libraries called from .NET applications.

### 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 2023.2.2

- Updated version print output to include build and config information.
- Fix potential hang on QNX when capturing the host backtrace.

### 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

- Added support for allocation padding via the `--padding` option.
- Added experimental support for NVTX memory API using option `--nvtx yes`. Please refer to NVTX API for Compute Sanitizer Reference Manual for more information.

### 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.
- The racecheck tool is not supported under Confidential Computing.

## 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.
- Microsoft Compute Driver Model (MCDM) is not supported with Hopper.

## 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) | No
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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### Copyright

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This product includes software developed by the Syncro Soft SRL (http://www.sync.ro/).