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Static analysis tools tend to get run on the kernel quite often and make for fantastic starting contributions. The issue is, as mentioned, there's a lot of fal
by broodbucket 9y ago
Static analysis tools tend to get run on the kernel quite often and make for fantastic starting contributions. The issue is, as mentioned, there's a lot of false positives and often times that's not really clear. You need a ton of domain knowledge to figure out if some warnings are actually bugs or not.
It would be cool if there was a single place that stored upstream warnings, be that from compilers on various architectures or from various static analysis tools like sparse, where maintainers/experienced contributors could help flag what is a bug, what isn't a bug, and what requires further investigation. Would probably reduce a ton of duplicated effort.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago> You need a ton of domain knowledge to figure out if some warnings are actually bugs or not. That isn't necessarily true. Coverity has its share of false positives but for the most part they're quickly dispatched by studying the surrounding code without needing intimate knowledge of how it works. On the other hand it readily finds legitimate bugs that are only triggered by a certain set of inputs through certain code paths that are easily missed by a human.