summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/docs/AddressSanitizer.html
blob: c1dc91bf4c88e6650bf5f267a367699f88d216c9 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" 
          "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<!-- Material used from: HTML 4.01 specs: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ -->
<html>
<head>
  <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
  <title>AddressSanitizer, a fast memory error detector</title>
  <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="../menu.css">
  <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="../content.css">
  <style type="text/css">
    td {
            vertical-align: top;
    }
  </style>
</head>
<body>

<!--#include virtual="../menu.html.incl"-->

<div id="content">

<h1>AddressSanitizer</h1>
<ul> 
  <li> <a href="intro">Introduction</a>
  <li> <a href="howtobuild">How to Build</a>
  <li> <a href="usage">Usage</a>
    <ul><li> <a href="has_feature">__has_feature(address_sanitizer)</a></ul>
  <li> <a href="platforms">Supported Platforms</a>
  <li> <a href="limitations">Limitations</a>
  <li> <a href="status">Current Status</a>
  <li> <a href="moreinfo">More Information</a>
</ul>

<h2 id="intro">Introduction</h2>
AddressSanitizer is a fast memory error detector.
It consists of a compiler instrumentation module and a run-time library.
The tool can detect the following types of bugs:
<ul> <li> Out-of-bounds accesses to  heap, stack and globals
  <li> Use-after-free
  <li> Use-after-return (to some extent)
  <li> Double-free, invalid free
</ul>
Typical slowdown introduced by AddressSanitizer is <b>2x</b>.

<h2 id="howtobuild">How to build</h2>
Follow the <a href="../get_started.html">clang build instructions</a>. <BR>
Note: CMake build does not work yet.
See <a href="http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=12272">bug 12272</a>.

<h2 id="usage">Usage</h2>
Simply compile and link your program with <tt>-faddress-sanitizer</tt> flag. <BR>
To get a reasonable performance add <tt>-O1</tt> or higher. <BR>
To get nicer stack traces in error messages add
<tt>-fno-omit-frame-pointer</tt>. <BR>
To get perfect stack traces you may need to disable inlining (just use <tt>-O1</tt>) and tail call
elimination (</tt>-fno-optimize-sibling-calls</tt>).

<pre>
% cat example_UseAfterFree.cc
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  int *array = new int[100];
  delete [] array;
  return array[argc];  // BOOM
}
</pre>

<pre>
% clang -O1 -g -faddress-sanitizer -fno-omit-frame-pointer example_UseAfterFree.cc
</pre>

If a bug is detected, the program will print an error message to stderr and exit with a
non-zero exit code.
Currently, AddressSanitizer does not symbolize its output, so you may need to use a
separate script to symbolize the result offline (this will be fixed in future).
<pre>
% ./a.out 2> log
% projects/compiler-rt/lib/asan/scripts/asan_symbolize.py / < log | c++filt
==9442== ERROR: AddressSanitizer heap-use-after-free on address 0x7f7ddab8c084 at pc 0x403c8c bp 0x7fff87fb82d0 sp 0x7fff87fb82c8
READ of size 4 at 0x7f7ddab8c084 thread T0
    #0 0x403c8c in main example_UseAfterFree.cc:4
    #1 0x7f7ddabcac4d in __libc_start_main ??:0
0x7f7ddab8c084 is located 4 bytes inside of 400-byte region [0x7f7ddab8c080,0x7f7ddab8c210)
freed by thread T0 here:
    #0 0x404704 in operator delete[](void*) ??:0
    #1 0x403c53 in main example_UseAfterFree.cc:4
    #2 0x7f7ddabcac4d in __libc_start_main ??:0
previously allocated by thread T0 here:
    #0 0x404544 in operator new[](unsigned long) ??:0
    #1 0x403c43 in main example_UseAfterFree.cc:2
    #2 0x7f7ddabcac4d in __libc_start_main ??:0
==9442== ABORTING
</pre>

<h3 id="has_feature">__has_feature(address_sanitizer)</h3>
In some cases one may need to execute different code depending on whether
AddressSanitizer is enabled.
<a href="LanguageExtensions.html#__has_feature_extension">__has_feature</a>
can be used for this purpose.
<pre>
#if defined(__has_feature) &amp;&amp; __has_feature(address_sanitizer)
  code that runs only under AddressSanitizer
#else
  code that does not run under AddressSanitizer
#endif
</pre>

<h2 id="platforms">Supported Platforms</h2>
AddressSanitizer is supported on
<ul><li>Linux x86_64 (tested on Ubuntu 10.04).
<li>MacOS 10.6 i386/x86_64.
</ul>
Support for Linux i386/ARM and MacOS 10.7 is in progress
(it may work, but is not guaranteed too).


<h2 id="limitations">Limitations</h2>
<ul>
  <li> AddressSanitizer uses more real memory than a native run.
  How much -- depends on the allocations sizes. The smaller the
  allocations you make the bigger the overhead.
  <li> On 64-bit platforms AddressSanitizer maps (but not reserves)
  16+ Terabytes of virtual address space.
  This means that tools like <tt>ulimit</tt> may not work as usually expected.
  <li> Static linking is not supported.
</ul>


<h2 id="status">Current Status</h2>
AddressSanitizer is fully functional on supported platforms in LLVM head.
However, the test suite is not fully integrated yet and we lack the testing
process (buildbots).

<h2 id="moreinfo">More Information</h2>
<a href="http://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/">http://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer</a>.


</div>
</body>
</html>