Re: net: wireless: add brcm80211 drivers

[Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@lip6.fr>]

On Mon, 14 May 2012, Dan Carpenter wrote:

> On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 09:07:55AM +0200, Arend van Spriel wrote:
>> Thanks for running smatch. I will look in the current code base and fix
>> this. Just out of curiosity: Another static checker used regularly is
>> Coccinelle. What are the pros and cons of smatch compared to Coccinelle?
>>
>> Gr. AvS
>
> That's a tricky question because of my obvious bias as the author
> of Smatch, and I'm not an expert on Coccinelle.  ;)
>
> Smatch works on the preprocessed code and Coccinelle works on .c
> code.  So some things are easier to check for in Coccinelle.  I've
> generally found hacks to get the information I need in Smatch but
> sometimes it's gnarly.  So a one liner in Coccinelle is twenty lines
> of code in Smatch which require in depth knowledge of Smatch and
> Sparse.
>
> Smatch doesn't fix the bugs it finds.
>
> The other advantage for Coccinelle is that you can run it on other
> architecture's code without setting up a cross compile environment.
>
> What Smatch does that Coccinelle doesn't is that it tries to track
> the values of all the variables.  This means you can detect array
> overflows, for example.  Smatch tries to track values across
> function calls as well, with the recent database work.
>
> That's really the long term goal of Smatch, to track the value of
> every variable in the kernel.  But there is still a lot of work to
> do.  :P

That all seems accurate to me :)

julia