Re: An example of a much more impactful way of doing file system-specific fuzzing

[Dmitry Vyukov]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 6:36 PM, Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Dmitry,
>
> I hope the below doesn't sound like a criticism; I am a *huge* fan of
> syzkaller.
>
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 06:18:07PM +0200, 'Dmitry Vyukov' via syzkaller wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 3. You say "not actionable reports without reproducers", but you can
>> find hundreds of fixed bugs without reproducers at [1] and [2]. Fix
>> ratio for bugs without reproducers is 66% which is not significantly
>> lower than 76% for bugs with reproducers. A person without expertise
>> in a particular subsystem (me) can't know if a bug is actionable by an
>> expert in the subsystem (you) without first reporting this bug.
>
> I think it might be possible to make this a bit easier, without any
> manual effort per-bug.
>
> For comparison, when the LKP kernel test robot reports a bug, it
> provides a script to reproduce the issue in a VM, such that the
> developer need only provide a kernel. The script launches the VM with
> the right options, providing a filesystem if necessary, etc.
>
> This is a little more actionale, since the developer need not expend any
> effort trying to reproduce the correct envinronment, which can be
> especially tricky for bugs that don't have a C reproducer.
>
> Would it be possible for syzbot to do something similar?

Hi Mark,

Yes, it is possible.
There is even https://github.com/google/syzkaller/issues/563 for this.
Now I've added a note that this script also needs to accept a
custom/local kernel (not sure what was the idea of this script without
such option).

Thanks