Author: regehr

Precision Opportunities for Demanded Bits in LLVM

[Although this post was written to stand by itself, it builds on the previous one. It is authored by Jubi Taneja, Zhengyang Liu, and John Regehr.] When designing computer systems, it can be useful to avoid specifying behaviors too tightly. For example, we might specify that a math library function only needs to return a… Continue reading Precision Opportunities for Demanded Bits in LLVM

Testing Dataflow Analyses for Precision and Soundness

[This piece is co-authored by Jubi Taneja, Zhengyang Liu, and John Regehr; it’s a summary of some of the findings from a paper that we just recently completed the camera ready copy for, that is going to be published at CGO (Code Generation and Optimization) 2020.] Update from Jan 12 2020: Looks like there’s a… Continue reading Testing Dataflow Analyses for Precision and Soundness

Helping Generative Fuzzers Avoid Looking Only Where the Light is Good, Part 1

Let’s take a second to recall this old joke: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost… Continue reading Helping Generative Fuzzers Avoid Looking Only Where the Light is Good, Part 1

Write Fuzzable Code

Fuzzing is sort of a superpower for locating vulnerabilities and other software defects, but it is often used to find problems baked deeply into already-deployed code. Fuzzing should be done earlier, and moreover developers should spend some effort making their code more amenable to being fuzzed. This post is a non-comprehensive, non-orthogonal list of ways… Continue reading Write Fuzzable Code

Design and Evolution of C-Reduce (Part 2)

Part 1 of this series introduced C-Reduce and showed how it combines a domain-independent core with a large collection of domain-specific passes in order to create a highly effective test-case reducer for C and C++ code. This part tells the rest of the story and concludes. Parallel Test-Case Reduction C-Reduce’s second research contribution is to… Continue reading Design and Evolution of C-Reduce (Part 2)

Design and Evolution of C-Reduce (Part 1)

[This piece is posted in parallel on the IEEE Software blog. Karim Ali copyedited.] Since 2008, my colleagues and I have developed and maintained C-Reduce, a tool for programmatically reducing the size of C and C++ files that trigger compiler bugs. C-Reduce also usually does a credible job reducing test cases in languages other than… Continue reading Design and Evolution of C-Reduce (Part 1)

It’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel

Alexia Massalin’s 1992 PhD thesis has long been one of my favorites. It promotes the view that operating systems can be much more efficient than then-current operating systems via runtime code generation, lock-free synchronization, and fine-grained scheduling. In this piece we’ll only look at runtime code generation, which can be cleanly separated from the other… Continue reading It’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel

Floating the Dirty Devil River

Packrafts are tough, light, individual-sized inflatable boats that people use to put together really amazing wilderness trips by combining rafting, hiking, and sometimes even biking. I’ve had sort of a low-grade obsession with packrafting since 2009 when I ran into some people in Alaska who were on their way to hike up and over the… Continue reading Floating the Dirty Devil River

Explaining Code using ASCII Art

People tend to be visual: we use pictures to understand problems. Mainstream programming languages, on the other hand, operate in an almost completely different kind of abstract space, leaving a big gap between programs and pictures. This piece is about pictures drawn using a text character set and then embedded in source code. I love… Continue reading Explaining Code using ASCII Art