Re: Google Summer of Code projects for the GNU C Library.

[Konstantin Serebryany <konstantin dot s dot serebryany at gmail dot com>]

Idea for glibc GSoC project: instrument the glibc source with
AddressSanitizer (asan).
https://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/
goal #1: test glibc itself for bugs like stack or global buffer overflow.
goal #2: improve the testing for projects that use glibc (i.e. all
projects on Linux).
E.g. if a program passes a pointer to invalid memory to glibc,
asan-instrumented glibc will detect it.
Today asan solves this problem partially by intercepting the most
interesting functions (e.g. memset),
but a complete solution is more than welcome.

Bonus level 1: the same thing for ThreadSanitizer
(https://code.google.com/p/thread-sanitizer) to detect more races in
user programs.
Bonus level 2: Use Clang instrumentation as an alternative to the GCC
instrumentation (may appear to be huge work, but very welcome)
Bonus level 3: (requires Bonus level 2): instrument glibc with
MemorySanitizer (https://code.google.com/p/memory-sanitizer) to detect
uses of uninitialized memory.

I'd be happy to mentor the project (will be equally happy not to, if
someone else wants that).

--kcc

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 4:14 AM, Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:
> Community,
>
> The GNU Project is participating in GSoC 2014 and have asked
> individual GNU projects to nominate their own GSoC projects
> under their umbrella.
>
> We have proposed an initial three projects for the GNU C Library
> and you can see them here:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas-2014.html
>
> At present I'm a mentor for glibc and Joseph Myers is a backup
> mentor. However we expect all participation to happen on libc-alpha
> and libc-help and that the community will assist in teaching
> the students how challenging/rewarding it is to work on system
> libraries.
>
> If anyone has any more project ideas they think a student can
> work on please suggest them here. Keep in mind that the idea
> has to be simple enough for a student to implement in a very
> limited time.
>
> We might not propose any more, but any ideas we come up with
> I'll put into a GSoC project page and we can draw from there
> next year instead of scrambling like I did today :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Carlos.