8 Section 1: Building Smatch
9 ---------------------------
11 Smatch requires sqlite3. It requires the binaries and the C, Perl and
12 Python libraries for sqlite3.
14 apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libdbd-sqlite3-perl
16 Smatch is easy to build. Just type `make`. There isn't an install process
17 right now so just run it from the build directory.
20 Section 2: Using Smatch
21 ------------------------
23 Smatch can be used with a cross function database. It's not mandatory to
24 build the database but it's a useful thing to do. Building the database
25 for the kernel takes 2-3 hours on my computer. For the kernel you build
28 cd ~/path/to/kernel_dir
29 ~/path/to/smatch_dir/smatch_scripts/build_kernel_data.sh
31 For projects other than the kernel you run Smatch with the options
32 "--call-tree --info --param-mapper --spammy" and finish building the
33 database by running the script:
35 ~/progs/smatch/devel/smatch_data/db/create_db.sh
37 Each time you rebuild the cross function database it becomes more accurate. I
38 normally rebuild the database every morning.
40 If you are running Smatch over the whole kernel you can use the following
43 ~/progs/smatch/devel/smatch_scripts/test_kernel.sh
45 The test_kernel.sh script will create a .c.smatch file for every file it tests
46 and a combined smatch_warns.txt file with all the warnings.
48 If you are running Smatch just over one kernel file:
50 ~/progs/smatch/devel/smatch_scripts/kchecker drivers/whatever/file.c
52 You can also build a directory like this:
54 ~/progs/smatch/devel/smatch_scripts/kchecker drivers/whatever/
56 The kchecker script prints its warnings to stdout.
58 If you are building something else (which is not the Linux kernel) then use
61 make CHECK="~/progs/smatch/devel/smatch --full-path" \
62 CC=~/progs/smatch/devel/smatch/cgcc | tee smatch_warns.txt
64 The makefile has to let people set the CC with an environment variable for that
68 Section 3: Smatch vs Sparse
69 ----------------------------
71 Smatch uses Sparse as a C parser. I have made a few hacks to Sparse so I
72 have to distribute the two together. Sparse is released under the MIT license
73 and Smatch is GPLv2+. If you make changes to Sparse please send those to the
74 Sparse mailing list linux-sparse@vger.kernel.org and I will pick them up from
75 there. Partly I do that for licensing reasons because I don't want to pull GPL
76 changes into the Sparse code I re-distribute.