For professors' note: use PVS-Studio to get students familiar with code analysis tools

by Andrey Karpov

The PVS-Studio analyzer can be regarded as a fine example of a modern static code analysis tool. First, it's a great example to show the abilities of static analysis tools in detecting errors and security defects. Second, you can demonstrate its integration into the software development cycle to enable continuous code control. In its example, you can show integration with such systems as Jenkins, TeamCity, Azure DevOps, SonarQube, Travis CI and others.

Getting Started with the PVS-Studio Static Analyzer for C++ Development under Linux

by Yuri Minaev

Besides strace, you can base the analysis on the compile_commands.json (JSON Compilation Database) file. Many build systems have built-in means of exporting compilation commands, or you could use the BEAR utility to do this. Here's the command to launch the analysis in this case: pvs-studio-analyzer analyze –f /path/to/compile_commands.json

PVS-Studio in the Clouds - Running the Analysis on Travis CI

by Oleg Andreev

Travis CI is a service for building and testing software that uses GitHub as a storage. Travis CI doesn't require changing of programming code for using the service. All settings are made in the file .travis.yml located in the root of the repository. We'll take LXC (Linux Containers) as a test project for PVS-Studio. It is a virtualization system at the operation system level for launching several instances of the Linux OS at one node. The project is small, but more than enough for demonstration.

PVS-Studio: Support of MISRA C and MISRA C++ Coding Standards

by Andrey Karpov

Such diagnosis can't be applied to already existing projects developed for Windows, Linux or macOS operating systems. For example, only one rule about curly brackets described above gives 1947 warnings of the V2507 diagnostic (MISRA C 15.6, MISRA C++ 6-4-1) for a WinMerge project. Still WinMerge is a small project! In total, only 250 000 lines of code in C and C# languages.

Technologies used in the PVS-Studio code analyzer for finding bugs and potential vulnerabilities

by Andrey Karpov

Here a mixture of technologies is working: data flow analysis, symbolic execution, and automatic method annotation (we will cover this technology in the next section). The analyzer sees that X variable is used in the Div function as a divisor. On this basis, a special annotation is built for the Div function. Further it is taken into account that in the function a range of values [0..4] is passed as the X argument. The analyzer comes to a conclusion that a division by 0 has to occur.

PVS-Studio 6.26 Released

by Andrey Karpov

A developer believes that this is a bug in the compiler. Nevertheless, it is the author of the code who is wrong. The function does not work correctly due to the fact that undefined behavior occurs in it. The compiler follows that in the r variable a certain sum is calculated. Overflow of the r variable must not happen. Otherwise, it is undefined behavior, which doesn't have to be considered or taken into account by a compiler. So, the compiler thinks that since the value of r variable after ending the loop cannot be negative, then r & 0x7fffffff operation is not needed to reset the sigh bit and the compiler just returns the value of r variable from the function.

PVS-Studio 6.24 released

by Andrey Karpov

Support for Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio, ARM compiler was added under Windows\Linux. 8 new diagnostics were introduced to detect errors in C and C++ code. In addition to the development of new diagnostics, we continue improving Data-Flow analysis that enables old diagnostics find more bugs. Thanks to these improvements, the analyzer finds more interesting errors, like the one we described in the article "February 31". Download and try PVS-Studio.

PVS-Studio is now available on macOS: 64 weaknesses in the Apple's XNU Kernel

by Andrey Karpov

Although the XNU Kernel is relatively small, it's a challenge to study the analyzer warnings alone, which takes much time. False positives make the check more complicated, since I haven't performed the preliminary analyzer configuration. I just quickly looked through the warnings, writing out code fragments that, in my opinion, represent interest. This is more than enough for writing a quite large article. PVS-Studio analyzer easily finds a large number of interesting bugs.

PVS-Studio 6.21 Release

by PVS-Studio Team

• Support for CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) was added to C/C++/C# analyzers.
• HTML log with source code navigation can now be saved from Visual Studio plug-ins and the Standalone tool.
• WDK (Windows Driver Kit) projects for Visual Studio 2017 are now supported.
• PVS-Studio plug-in for SonarQube was updated for the latest LTS version 6.7.
• V1007. The value from the uninitialized optional is used. Probably it is a mistake.

PVS-Studio Reports Now in Html

by Svyatoslav Razmyslov

It allows you to search for and sort messages by type, file, level, code, and warning text. What makes it special is that it allows you to navigate faulty fragments in the source files pointed out by the analyzer. The reported source files themselves are copied to Html and become part of the report. To see how FullHtml really looks like, I converted in this format one of the latest reports, which I've used when writing the article about the MuseScore project: MuseScoreHtml.7z.