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PVS-Studio Analyzer Spots 40 Bugs In the FreeBSD Kernel

Andrey_Karpov writes: Svyatoslav Razmyslov from PVS-Studio Team published an article on the check of the FreeBSD kernel. PVS-Studio developers are known for analyzing various projects to show the abilities of their product, and do some advertisement, of course. Perhaps, this is one of the most acceptable and useful ways of promoting a proprietary application. They have already checked more than 200 projects and detected 9355 bugs. At least that's the number of bugs in the error base of their company.

So now it was FreeBSD kernel's turn. The source code was taken from GitHub 'master' branch. Svyatoslav states that PVS-Studio detected more than 1000 suspicious code fragments that are most likely bugs or inaccurate code. He described 40 of them in the article. The list of warnings was given to the FreeBSD developer team and they have already started editing the code.

A couple of words for programmers who are still not familiar with PVS-Studio. PVS-Studio is a tool for bug detection in the source code of programs, written in C, C++ and C#. It performs static code analysis and generates a report that helps a programmer find and fix the errors in the code. You can see a more detailed description of the tool on the company website and download a trial version.

3 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. This ought to fix most of that ... :-) by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Funny

    PVS-Studio detected more than 1000 suspicious code fragments that are most likely bugs or inaccurate code.

    /*NOTREACHED*/

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    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  2. Bethesda Softworks by Merovign · · Score: 5, Funny

    Somebody get this to Bethesda, stat!

  3. Re:ahhhh advertising, my good friend! by Vertigo+Acid · · Score: 3, Funny

    I disagree. It doesn't just look bad, it's indentation is communicating semantics that aren't accurate. It should be corrected. Something that should be corrected... is a flaw.

    You say its "working as intended" (and I presume it is); but the message the developer communicated with that formatting is that he intended for it to work differently from how it does in fact work.

    I agree its "just a formatting error"... but its a particularly nasty one; and code like that SHOULD be investigated and corrected.

    Thank god FreeBSD isn't written in python

    --
    Beta is bad enough to make me go edit settings like this sig that haven't been touched since I joined