Re: [Ksummit-discuss] coverity, static checking etc.

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 07:31:14PM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-05-09 at 10:19 -0700, josh@joshtriplett.org wrote:
> 
> > I'd like to see this topic as well.  I think we could do a lot better
> > here than we do.  And don't forget that GCC is one of our top static
> > analysis tools, if only because it's the only one *everyone* runs; that
> > includes both warnings and the possibility of shipping and building our
> > own GCC plugin.
> > 
> > I'd also like to nominate Christopher Li, for Sparse.
> 
> Seconded, I'm also interested in general in whether people still think
> sparse is useful and we should give it attention, or should focus more
> on really getting everything into gcc - we have a number of sparse
> warnings in very low-level header files that get used everywhere, for
> example the one I just fixed in [1] or the one I tried to fix but that
> ended up being buggy ([2]), but there doesn't seem to be much attention
> to these during the patch submission etc.

I definitely still find Sparse useful and regularly check my own kernel
code with it.  Fengguang Wu's automated build-and-test bot also uses
Sparse.

I *would* like to see more of Sparse's functionality make it into GCC,
so that it gets used as part of default builds.  HPA and I have been
working to document some of the major bits so that GCC can implement
them [1], and Tom Tromey is working on GCC implementations [2].

[1]
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59850
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59851
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59852
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59855
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59856

[2] https://github.com/tromey/gcc/tree/add-sparse-attributes

- Josh Triplett