Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Testing Chromium: AddressSanitizer, a fast memory error detector.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Valgrind
is a great tool for detecting memory errors. We are running many Chromium tests under Valgrind and it has helped us find
hundreds of significant bugs
. However, when we run binaries under Valgrind, testing becomes at least 10 times slower. This huge slowdown costs us more than just machine time; our trybots and buildbots can’t provide fast feedback and some tests fail due to timeouts.
A month ago we released
AddressSanitizer
(aka ASan), a new testing tool. ASan consists of two parts:
A compiler which performs instrumentation - currently we use a modified
LLVM
/
Clang
and we're trying to contribute our code to the core LLVM package.
A run-time library that replaces
malloc()
,
free()
and friends.
The custom
malloc()
allocates more bytes than requested and “poisons” the redzones around the region returned to the caller. The custom
free()
“poisons” the entire region and puts it into quarantine for some time. The instrumented code produced by the compiler checks if the address being accessed is poisoned and if so, reports an error. The compiler also inserts poisoned redzones between objects on stack to catch stack buffer overrun/underrun.
ASan helps us find a subset of bugs that are detectable by Valgrind like heap buffer overrun/underrun (out-of-bounds access) and “Use after free.” It can also detect bugs that Valgrind can not find, such as stack buffer overrun/underrun. Last month alone, ASan helped us find more than 20 bugs in Chromium including some that could have potentially led to security vulnerabilities.
What makes ASan even more powerful than other comparable tools is its speed. On
SPEC CPU2006
benchmarks the
average slowdown
is about 2x. On Chromium’s “browser_tests”, the slowdown is about 20%. If you are curious to learn why ASan is faster than comparable tools read this
article
.
Today ASan works only on Linux (x86 and x86_64) and ChromiumOS, but we're planning to port it to other platforms in the near future. In the coming months we also plan to setup various ASan buildbots and trybots for Chromium.
The
AddressSanitizer home page
has the instructions for running it with your favorite project outside of Chromium. If you are working on Chromium, refer to this
page
for instructions. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact address-sanitizer@googlegroups.com
Posted by Kostya Serebryany, Software Engineer
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