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.

Comments

Re:Poor Practices by PVS Studio and HexRays

[BitZtream]

t seems like every time they do this for promotion they just claim everything as a "bug" without really individually investigating and reporting all of them, taking only some obviously wrong ones and then lumping the whole report onto the project's bug tracker, if we're lucky.

Yep, I've looked at the article and found a couple legitimate bugs, and the rest of it is the authors complete misunderstanding of what he's talking about. He doesn't seem to understand that strcpy and memcpy DO NOT DO THE SAME THING. He assumes that an extra tab means an if was done incorrectly, goes on about bad practices when its just that he doesn't know what the code is doing and taking 3 seconds to understand that a MACRO behaves differently on different architectures and maybe, just maybe, the hardcode 0 makes sense on that specific architecture and not on others ... which he could have found had he simply checked the places where the MACRO was defined instead of just the one that was compiled.

This guy is just using this for slashvertisments, which is great, because we can now pick apart his shitty analysis and make fun of it :)