GSoC 2018 Reports: Kernel Address Sanitizer, Part 1

Prepared by Siddharth Muralee (@Tr3x__) as part of GSoC 2018.

It's been a fun couple of weeks since I started working on the Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASan) project with NetBSD. I have learned a lot during this period. It's been pretty amazing. This is a report on the work I have done prior to the first evaluation period.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

GSoC 2018 Reports: Integrate libFuzzer with the Basesystem, Part 1

Prepared by Yang Zheng (tomsun.0.7 AT Gmail DOT com) as part of GSoC 2018

During the Google Summer of Code 2018, I'm working on the project of integrating libFuzzer for the userland applications. The libFuzzer is a fuzzing engine based on the coverage information provided by the SanitizerCoverage in LLVM. It can repeatedly generate mutations of input data and test them until it finds the potential bugs. In this post, I'm going to share what I have done in the first month of this summer.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Coverage of signal routines in the kernel in the context of ptrace(2)

During the past month I have been working on coverage of various corner cases in the signal subsystem in the kernel. I have also spent some time on improvements in the land of sanitizers. As a mentor I was able to, thanks to the fulltime focus on NetBSD work, actively help three Google Summer of Code students. Not every question would be answered by myself without code reading but at least I am available for active collaboration, especially when it's to improve code that I have already authored, like sanitizers. At the end of the month we have managed to catch two uninitialized memory reads in the top(1) utility, using the Memory Sanitizer feature and rebuilt part of the basesystem (i.e. library dependencies: libterminfo, libkvm, libutil) with dedicated sanitization flags. [Read More] [0 comments]

 

Forking fixes in the context of debuggers

For the past month I've been mostly working on improving the kernel code in the ptrace(2) API. Additionally, I've prepared support for reading NetBSD/aarch64 core(5) files. [Read More] [0 comments]

 

Struggling to fix a bohrbug in X86 Debug Registers

I've spent a month on fixes and debugging issues around the tracing facilities in the kernel.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

LLDB restoration and return to ptrace(2)

I've managed to unbreak the LLDB debugger as much as possible with the current kernel and hit problems with ptrace(2) that are causing issues with further work on proper NetBSD support. Meanwhile, I've upstreamed all the planned NetBSD patches to sanitizers and helped other BSDs to gain better or initial support.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

The LLVM Sanitizers stage accomplished

I've managed to get the Memory Sanitizer to work for the elementary base system utilities, like ps(1), awk(1) and ksh(1). This means that the toolchain is ready for tests and improvements. I've iterated over the base system utilities and I looked for bugs, both in programs and in sanitizers. The number of detected bugs in the userland programs was low, there merely was one reading of an uninitialized variable in ps(1).[Read More] [0 comments]

 

The LLVM Memory Sanitizer support work in progress

In the past 31 days, I've managed to get the core functionality of MSan to work. This is an uninitialized memory usage detector. MSan is a special sanitizer because it requires knowledge of every entry to the basesystem library and every entry to the kernel through public interfaces. This is mandatory in order to mark memory regions as initialized.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

The LLVM Thread Sanitizer has been ported to NetBSD

During the past month I've finished my work on TSan for NetBSD/amd64. There are still few minor issues, although the Sanitizer is already suitable for real applications and is stable. I was able to build real applications like LLDB against TSan and get it to work to find real threading problems.

The process of stabilization and fixing TSan was challenging as there are intermixed types of issues that resulted in one big random breakage bug that is difficult to analyze. Software debuggers need more work with threaded programs, so this was like a chicken-egg problem, to debug debugging utilities.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

One year checkpoint and Thread Sanitizer update

The past year has been started with bugfixes and the development of regression tests for ptrace(2) and related kernel features, as well as the continuation of bringing LLDB support and LLVM sanitizers (ASan + UBsan and partial TSan + Msan) to NetBSD.
My plan for the next year is to finish implementing TSan and MSan support, followed by a long run of bug fixes for LLDB, ptrace(2), and other related kernel subsystems[Read More] [1 comment]

 

2017 NetBSD Foundation Officers

By vote of The NetBSD Foundation Board of Directors, the officers for the 2017 term are:

President: William J. Coldwell <billc>
Vice President: Jeremy C. Reed <reed>
Secretary: Christos Zoulas <christos>
Treasurer: Christos Zoulas <christos>
Assistant Secretary: Thomas Klausner <wiz>
Assistant Treasurer: Taylor R. Campbell <riastradh>
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EuroBSDcon-2017 Paris

This year the annual EuroBSDcon event took place in Paris (September 21st-24th). There were BSD summits, tutorials and talks, including NetBSD & pkgsrc ones.[Read More] [0 comments]