Using sparse for endianness verification

Posted Oct 26, 2006 4:51 UTC (Thu) by bos (guest, #6154)
Parent article: Using sparse for endianness verification

I completely agree with Jon's endorsement of sparse. It's trivial to build and almost trivial to install. I say "almost trivial" because for some reason the binary it builds is called "check", while the program that the kernel build expects to run is called "sparse". So if you're not one to run "make install", remember to "cp check $DESTDIR/sparse".

I used sparse heavily to annotate the ipath driver in several different ways: endianness, opacity of some types, and visibility to userspace. These absolutely helped me to find and squish bugs that would not otherwise have been obvious, especially the endianness annotations (which makes sense, since the ipath driver is a network driver).