Re: GCC GSoC 2021 - Static analyzer project

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2021-02-11 at 22:35 +0530, Adharsh Kamath wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> > Building GCC from source and stepping through it in the
> > debugger would be good next steps.  You'll need plenty of disk
> > space.
> >  "run_checkers" is a good breakpoint to set if you're looking for
> > the
> > entrypoint to the analyzer.
> > 
> 
> I tried this and I understood the control flow in the analyzer.
> 
> > There's an example plugin in that patch.  The kernel source tree
> > already has some plugins, so hopefully, those together give some
> > pointers on how to write a "hello world" analyzer plugin that runs
> > as
> > part of the kernel build, which would be another next step, I
> > guess.
> > 
> 
> I implemented a very simple hello world plugin here -
> https://github.com/adharshkamath/Hello-world-plugin.
> <https://github.com/adharshkamath/Hello-world-plugin>
> It just prints a Hello message while building the Linux Kernel, if
> the
> -fanalyzer option is enabled. I referred to the example plugin in the
> static analyzer
> and the plugins in the kernel source to do this.

Excellent.

> > See::
> >   * "How to write system-specific, static checkers in Metal"
> > (Benjamin
> > Chelf, Dawson R Engler, Seth Hallem), from 2002
> >   * "Checking system rules using system-specific, programmer-
> > written
> > compiler extensions" Proceedings of Operating Systems Design and
> > Implementation (OSDI), September 2000. D. Engler, B. Chelf, A.
> > Chou,
> > and S. Hallem.
> >   * "Using Programmer-Written Compiler Extensions to Catch Security
> > Holes" (Ken Ashcraft, Dawson Engler) from 2002
> > 
> 
> These were useful and interesting to read. Thank you for suggesting
> them.
> Adharsh

Great.

I believe you're in a position to write a strong application to GSoC
for yourself for this project; you're well ahead of the timeline, as I
understand it:
  https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/how-it-works/#timeline

Dave