Open source *

Modern applications are built from third-party libraries like a wall from bricks. Their usage is the only option to complete the project in a reasonable time, spending a sensible budget, so it's a usual practice. However, taking all the bricks indiscriminately may not be such a good idea. If there are several options, it is useful to take time to analyze open libraries in order to choose the best one.

This is the concluding part of my article devoted to a statistical analysis of police shootings and criminality among the white and the black population of the United States. In the first part, we talked about the research background, goals, assumptions, and source data; in the second part, we investigated the national use-of-force and crime data and tracked their connection with race.

In the previous part of this article, I talked about the research background, goals, assumptions, source data, and used tools. Today, without further ado, let's say together…

Do the police in the US really shoot black people more often than white people? Is use of lethal force connected with race? How is crime related to race? What are the odds of getting shot by the police if you are white and if you are black? We're taking public data and python with pandas to shed some light on these questions, propaganda and politics set far aside.

QEMU is a rather well-known application for emulation. Static analysis can help developers of complex projects such as QEMU catch errors at early stages and generally improve quality and reliability of a project. In this article, we will check the source code of the QEMU application for potential vulnerabilities and errors using the PVS-Studio static analysis tool.

XMage is a client-server application for playing Magic: The Gathering (MTG). XMage's development was started in early 2010. Since then, it has seen 182 releases, attracted an army of contributors, and it's still being actively developed even now. All that makes it a good reason for us to contribute to its development too! So, today the PVS-Studio unicorn is going to check the code base of XMage and maybe even get into a fight with some entities.

We were asked to check a collection of open source PMDK libraries for developing and debugging applications with NVRAM support by PVS-Studio. Well, why not? Moreover, this is a small project in C and C++ with a total code base size of about 170 KLOC without comments. Which means, the results review won't take much energy and time. Let's go.

This article is about the check of the OpenRA project using the static PVS-Studio analyzer. What is OpenRA? It is an open source game engine designed to create real-time strategies. The article describes the analysis process, project features, and warnings that PVS-Studio has issued. And, of course, here we will discuss some features of the analyzer that made the project checking process more comfortable.

The American company Electronic Arts Inc (EA) has opened the source code of the games Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Command & Conquer: Red Alert publicly available. Several dozen errors were detected in the source code using the PVS-Studio analyzer, so, please, welcome the continuation of found defects review.

The American company Electronic Arts Inc (EA) has made the source code of the games Command & Conquer: Tibetan Dawn and Command & Conquer: Red Alert publicly available. This code should help the game community to develop mods and maps, create custom units, and customize the gameplay logic. We all now have a unique opportunity to plunge into the history of development, which is very different from the modern one. Back then, there was no StackOverflow site, convenient code editors, or powerful compilers. Moreover, at that time, there were no static analyzers, and the first thing the community will face is hundreds of errors in the code. This is what the PVS-Studio team will help you with by pointing out the erroneous places.

This time, the PVS-Studio team's attention was attracted by Ghidra, a big bad reverse-engineering framework allowing developers to analyze binary files and do horrible things to them. The most remarkable fact about it is not even that it's free and easily extensible with plugins but that it was developed and uploaded to GitHub for public access by NSA. On the one hand, you bet NSA has enough resources for keeping their code base clean. On the other hand, new contributors, who are not well familiar with it, may have accidentally introduced bugs that could stay unnoticed. So, we decided to feed the project to our static analyzer and see if it has any code issues.

This article coincides with the beta testing start of PVS-Studio C# for Linux, as well as the plugin for Rider. For such a wonderful reason, we checked the source code of the Nethermind product using these tools. This article will cover some distinguished and, in some cases, funny errors.

We continue to investigate external device interrupt routing setup in the x86 system.

In Part 1 (Interrupt controller evolution) we looked at the theory behind interrupt controllers and all the necessary terminology. In Part 2 (Linux kernel boot options) we looked at how in practice the OS chooses between different interrupt controllers. In this part we will investigate how the BIOS sets IRQ to the interrupt controllers routing in a chipset.

None of the modern BIOS developer companies (AwardBIOS/AMIBIOS/Insyde) open their source code. But luсkily there is coreboot — a project aimed at replacing proprietary BIOS with free firmware code. In its source code we'll see what is needed to setup the interrupt routing in a chipset.

The basics of porting

Originally, Buildroot offers a limited number of packages. It makes sense — there is everything you need, but any other packages can be added.

To add a package, create 2 description files, an optional checksum file, and add a link to the package in the general package list. There are hooks at different stages of the build. At the same time, Buildroot can recognize the needed type of packages:

Intro

Like I said earlier in previos articles, Buildroot is a great system for embedded Linux development. But sometimes strange things can happen.

Once upon a workday, I got the following task: add printing system in firmware (Kraftway terminal Linux next generation). Ok, so I had to add cups + cups filter and to build firmware. I set a postscript-printer and got an error "Filter failed". Trivial tasks turned into serious work.

In this article, I wrote my own way of solving this problem. It may be useful for other developers and IT-specialist and, also, for a deeper understanding of the Buildroot.

If you are a Buildroot beginner, I recommend reading my previous articles.

Update 1 may 2020

Revisioned versions of this patches applied to master.

Some time ago, somewhere on the Internet, I stumbled upon a physics engine called Newton Game Dynamics. Knowing that engine projects are usually big and complex, I decided to check its code with PVS-Studio for any interesting defects. I was especially enthusiastic about this one because my co-worker Andrey Karpov already checked it in 2014 and a second check would be a good opportunity to demonstrate our analyzer's evolution over the past six years. As of this writing, the latest version of Newton Game Dynamics is dated February 27, 2020, which means it has been actively developing for the past six years too. So, hopefully, this article will be interesting not only to us but to the engine's developers as well – and for them it's a chance to fix some bugs and improve their code.

About a week I wonder around the idea of this article, mainly, because of missing the content here and tidiness of the coronavirus-themes. But, when robotic-harvester, hacking zip with bitcoins and other cool articles released — I decided not to publish crude material.

However, unexpectedly today the maintainer of this review hero showed up from the lockdown and, several hours ago reapy v0.6.0 has been published on PyPi. Under the cut — the last change log, which contains (to my pleasure) no line where I have not been involved one way, or another.

Finally: why reapy is needed and how Python works inside REAPER.

The GCC compiler is written with copious use of macros. Another check of the GCC code using PVS-Studio once again confirms the opinion of our team that macros are evil in the flesh. Not only does the static analyzer struggle with reviewing such code, but also a developer. GCC developers are certainly used to the project and are well versed in it. Nonetheless, it is very difficult to understand something on the third hand. Actually, due to macros, it was not possible to fully perform code checking. However, the PVS-Studio analyzer, as always, showed that it can find errors even in compilers.

Static analysis is an extremely useful tool for any developer, as it helps to find in time not only errors, but also suspicious and strange code fragments that may cause bewilderment of programmers who will have to work with it in the future. This idea will be demonstrated by the analysis of the TensorFlow.NET open C# project, developed for working with the popular TensorFlow machine learning library.

Some time ago we announced PVS-Studio's new feature that enabled it to integrate into PlatformIO. Naturally, our team kept in touch with the PlatformIO team while working on that feature, and they suggested that we check the real-time operating system Zephyr to see if we could find any interesting bugs in its code. We thought it was a good idea, and so here's this article about the check results.