
Requirements
------------
- You need GCC 3.4 or later to compile the s390 port.
- A working combination of autotools is required.
- To run valgrind a z900 machine or any later model is needed.


Limitations
-----------
- 31-bit client programs are not supported.
- Hexadecimal floating point is not supported.
- Decimal floating point is not supported yet.
- memcheck, massif, lackey, and none are supported.
- cachegrind is supported on z10 and newer models. On older models,
  a z10 cache architecture will be assumed.
- callgrind and all experimental tools are currently not supported.
- helgrind and drd seem to work on SLES10,11 and RHEL5,6 on z9,z10 and z196
  but might fail on other hardware/software combinations.
- Some gcc versions use mvc to copy 4/8 byte values. This will affect some
  debug messages. Valgrind will complain about 4 or 8 one-byte reads/writes
  instead of just 1 read/write.


Hardware facilities
-------------------
Valgrind does not require that the host machine has the same hardware
facilities as the machine for which the client program was compiled.
This is convenient. The JIT compiler will translate the client instructions
according to the facilities available on the host.
This means, though, that probing for hardware facilities by issuing
instructions from that facility and observing whether SIGILL is thrown
may not work. As a consequence, programs that attempt to do so may
behave differently. It is believed that this is a rare use case.


Recommendations
---------------
Applications should be compiled with -fno-builtin to avoid
false positives due to builtin string operations when running memcheck.


Reading Material
----------------
(1) Linux for zSeries ELF ABI Supplement
    http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/ELF/zSeries/index.html
(2) z/Architecture Principles of Operation
    http://publibfi.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/dz9zr009.pdf
(3) z/Architecture Reference Summary
    http://publibfi.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/dz9zs007.pdf