goblint / goblint/analyzer

Type-based race warnings on `void`

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question unsound
Dominant language
OCaml
Stars
252
Forks
90
Avg merge
4d 1m
Merged PRs (30d)
19

Description

It seems that after #1084, chrony has a new race warning on

[Warning][Race] Memory location (void const   ) (race with conf. 100):

This is due to accesses through void* yielding a type-based race warning.

However, void values don't exist, so this doesn't make much sense. A more sound behavior would be to have an additional outward race access distribution special case that void accesses go to all (which?) types, because a void* may point to anything.
The question is whether this ends up causing too much additional race warnings. Already type-based races assume that races don't happen through pointers cast to different types, so some unsound assumptions are already being made.

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the chrony warning shown in the issue and inspect how accesses through void* receive type-based race warnings. Compare the proposed outward race access distribution special case with the existing assumptions about races through differently typed pointers, then determine whether void accesses should reach all types without causing excessive additional warnings.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c, ocaml
Domain
devtools
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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