Re: [Ksummit-discuss] uninitialized variables bugs

From: Shuah Khan
Date: Fri May 06 2022 - 12:23:49 EST


On 5/6/22 5:56 AM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 11:13 AM Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


It's frustrating. Sometimes the false positives are hard to analyse
because I have to read through multiple functions. A lot of times
when I write a patch and a commit message Nathan has already fixed it
so it's just a waste of time.

Agreed. I'm not actually checking for those warnings on gcc any more,
but just the clang warnings point to a bigger problem.

It's risky as well. The Smatch check for uninitialized variables was
broken for most of 2021. Nathan sometimes goes on vacation.

I guess I would hope that one day we can turn on the GCC uninitialized
variable warnings again. That would mean silencing false positives
which a lot of people don't want to do... Maybe Clang has fewer false
positives than GCC?


I would like to throw resource leak bugs in the mix. I am finding cppcheck
has been effective in finding them.

I am seeing a lot of file pointer leaks in error legs in kselftest code error
paths. I have a few fixes in the works to send out.

We could discuss this topic at the LPC Kernel Testing and Dependability mini-conf
as well.

thanks,
-- Shuah