Re: [csmith-bugs] Infinite loops in generated csmith code

[Eric Eide <eeide@cs.utah.edu>]

Stanley Tzeng <stzeng@nvidia.com> writes:

> Hello CSmith Developers:

Hi!

> I’ve been using your tool and I’ve found two cases where CSmith generated
> code with for loops that would run forever (or, at least until int overflowed
> and then some more). It seems like this might be a bug in the loop
> generation. I’ve attached the testcases as test1.c and test2.c for your
> reference.

Thank you for your report!

Yes, Csmith does sometimes generate loops that do not terminate.  The reason
for this is explained in our paper about Csmith:

	"It is not difficult to generate random programs that always terminate.
	However, we judged that this would limit Csmith’s expressiveness too
	much: for example, it would force loops to be highly structured.
	Additionally, always-terminating tests cannot find compiler bugs that
	wrongfully terminate a non-terminating program.  (We have found bugs of
	this kind.)  About 10% of the programs generated by Csmith are
	(apparently) non-terminating.  In practice, during testing, they are
	easy to deal with using timeouts."

You can find this paper online, <http://www.flux.utah.edu/paper/yang-pldi11>.

> Is there some way to force the compiler to only generate loop increments of
> ++ or --?  That would be a quick workaround to this problem.

I don't believe that we ever implemented a Csmith feature like that, but that's
an interesting idea!

Thanks ---

Eric.

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Eric Eide <eeide@cs.utah.edu>  .         University of Utah School of Computing
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