Balancing Analysis Time and Bug Detection: Daily Development-friendly Bug Detection in Linux

Linux, a battle-tested codebase, is known to suffer from many bugs despite its extensive testing mechanisms. While many of these bugs require domain-specific knowledge for detection, a significant portion matches well-known bug patterns. Even though these bugs can be found with existing tools, our simple check of Linux kernel patches suggests that these tools are not used much in the developer's daily workflow. The lack of usage is probably due to the well-known trade-off between analysis time and bug detection capabilities: tools typically employ complex analysis to effectively and comprehensively find bugs in return for a long analysis time, or focus on a short analysis time by only employing elementary analyses and thus can only find a very limited number of bugs. Ideally, developers expect the tools to incur short analysis time, while still finding many bugs to use them in daily development.

This paper explores an approach that balances this tradeoff by focusing on bugs that can be found with less computationally-complex analysis methods, and limiting the scope to each source code. To achieve this, we propose a combination of computationally lightweight analyses and demonstrate our claim by designing FiTx, a framework for generating daily development-friendly bug checkers that focus on well-known patterns. Despite its simplicity, FiTx successfully identified 47 new bugs in the Linux kernel version 5.15 within 2.5 hours, outperforming Clang Static Analyzer and CppCheck in both speed and bug detection. It demonstrates that focusing on less complex bug patterns can still significantly contribute to the improvement of codebase health. FiTx can be embedded into the daily development routine, enabling early bug detection without sacrificing developers' time.