Bug 800126

Summary:	Bugs found in pylibacl-0.5.0-4.fc17 using gcc-with-cpychecker static analyzer
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Dave Malcolm <dmalcolm>
Component:	pylibacl	Assignee:	Marcin Zajaczkowski <mszpak>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	rawhide	CC:	iustin, mszpak
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
URL:	http://fedorapeople.org/~dmalcolm/gcc-python-plugin/2012-03-05/pylibacl-0.5.0-4.fc17/
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2012-08-09 18:58:33 EDT	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---
Bug Depends On:
Bug Blocks:	789472

Description Dave Malcolm 2012-03-05 14:32:40 EST

Description of problem:
I've been writing an experimental static analysis tool to detect bugs commonly occurring within C Python extension modules:
  https://fedorahosted.org/gcc-python-plugin/
  http://gcc-python-plugin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/cpychecker.html
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/StaticAnalysisOfPythonRefcounts

I ran the latest version of the tool (in git master; post 0.9) on
pylibacl-0.5.0-4.fc17.src.rpm, and it reports various errors.

You can see a list of errors here, triaged into categories (from most significant to least significant):
http://fedorapeople.org/~dmalcolm/gcc-python-plugin/2012-03-05/pylibacl-0.5.0-4.fc17/

I've manually reviewed the issues reported by the tool.

Within the category "Unclassified errors" the 1 issue reported looks like a genuine bug: the Py_DECREF(format) at line 746 appears to be wrong, and could lead to "format" being deallocated before returning it.

Within the category "Reference count too low" the 1 issue reported appears to be the same issue as above.

Within the category "Reference leaks" the 2 issues reported appear to be genuine bugs:
  acl.c:ACL_check:ob_refcnt of PyIntObject is 1 too high: suggest using:
Py_BuildValue("ii", result, eindex) instead, to avoid the leak (and the possibility of PyInt_FromLong failing).

  acl.c:Entry_str:ob_refcnt of '*format' is 1 too high: this is missing a Py_DECREF(format) in the final error-handling path.

Within the category "Segfaults within error-handling paths" the 5 issues reported appear to be genuine bugs.  Note that you can use Py_XDECREF() rather than Py_DECREF() if the pointer could be NULL.

Within the category "Possible reference leaks" the 1 issues reported looks like a memory leak, assuming that Permset_new() returns a new reference when it succeeds (rather than a borrowed reference).

There may of course be other bugs in my checker tool.

Hope this is helpful; let me know if you need help reading the logs that the tool generates - I know that it could use some improvement.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
pylibacl-0.5.0-4.fc17
gcc-python-plugin post-0.9 git 11462291a66c8db693c8884cb84b795bb5988ffb running the checker in an *f16* chroot

Comment 1 Marcin Zajaczkowski 2012-03-05 16:41:20 EST

Hi Dave! Your tool looks very interesting. I will contact the author of pylibacl to allow him to take a look at the results.

Comment 2 Iustin Pop 2012-03-05 17:05:33 EST

Thanks a lot for this, it's very useful. I'll see about fixing the bugs and making a new release.

I'll probably need to build myself the same environment first, though…

Comment 3 Iustin Pop 2012-05-14 16:17:10 EDT

Hi,

I've released a new version; I believe it has fixed all reported issues.

Thanks Dave for this very nice tool!

Comment 4 Fedora Update System 2012-06-26 17:21:34 EDT

pylibacl-0.5.1-2.fc17 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 17.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/pylibacl-0.5.1-2.fc17

Comment 5 Fedora Update System 2012-06-26 17:21:44 EDT

pylibacl-0.5.1-2.fc16 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 16.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/pylibacl-0.5.1-2.fc16

Comment 6 Fedora Update System 2012-06-27 23:21:29 EDT

Package pylibacl-0.5.1-2.fc17:
* should fix your issue,
* was pushed to the Fedora 17 testing repository,
* should be available at your local mirror within two days.
Update it with:
# su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing pylibacl-0.5.1-2.fc17'
as soon as you are able to.
Please go to the following url:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-9973/pylibacl-0.5.1-2.fc17
then log in and leave karma (feedback).

Comment 7 Fedora Update System 2012-08-09 18:58:33 EDT

pylibacl-0.5.1-2.fc17 has been pushed to the Fedora 17 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.