Tips

1. To get nicer stack traces in error messages add -fno-omit-frame-pointer.
2. To get perfect stack traces you may need to disable inlining (just use -O1) and tail call elimination (-fno-optimize-sibling-calls).

Useful links

1. https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki

Options

All Sanitizer options and their description

Useful options

1. verbosity=
   • 0 by default - silent
   • 1 - a bit of output
   • 2+ - more output
2. color=always
   • auto by default
3. coverage=1
   • If set, coverage information will be dumped at program shutdown
   • 0 by default
4. help=1
   • Print the flag options
   • 0 by default

Address Sanitizer

Useful links

1. Supported platforms
2. FAQ
3. Report format examples, check list of refs

Overhead

Typical slowdown: 2 Typical memory overhead: 3 for stack memory and some for heap

ASAN_OPTIONS

All Address Sanitizer options and their description

Useful options

1. check_initialization_order=1
   • 0 by default
2. detect_stack_use_after_return=1
   • 0 by default
3. strict_init_order=1
   • If true, assume that dynamic initializers can never access globals from other modules, even if the latter are already initialized
   • 0 by default
4. strict_string_checks=1
   • If set check that string arguments are properly null-terminated
   • 0 by default
5. debug=1
   • If set, prints some debugging information and does additional checks
   • 0 by default
6. report_globals=2
   • Controls the way to handle globals
   • 0 - don't detect buffer overflow on globals
   • 1 by default - detect buffer overflow
   • 2 - print data about registered globals
7. sleep_after_init/sleep_before_dying=
   • Number of seconds to sleep after AddressSanitizer is initialized or between printing an error report and terminating the program
   • Useful for debugging purposes (e.g. when one needs to attach gdb)
   • 0 by default
8. atexit=1
   • If set, prints ASan exit stats even after program terminates successfully
   • 0 by default
9. print_stats=1
   • Print various statistics after printing an error message or if atexit=1
   • 0 by default
10. print_scariness=1
    • Print the scariness score
    • Experimental
    • 0 by default
11. halt_on_error=0
    • Crash the program after printing the first error report
    • WARNING: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
    • 1 by default

Thread Sanitizer

Useful links

1. About
2. Supported platforms
3. Supported atomic operations
4. FAQ
5. Report format
6. Popular data races

Overhead

Typical slowdown: [2..20] or [5..15] Typical memory overhead: [3..10] or [5..10]

TSAN_OPTIONS

All Thread Sanitizer options and their description

Useful options

1. detect_deadlocks=1
   • Description
   • by default 0, because experimental
2. force_seq_cst_atomics=1
   • Turns all atomic operations into sequentially consistent operations
   • 0 by default
3. stop_on_start=1
   • Pause the program during ThreadSanitizer initialization
   • 0 by default
4. io_sync=[0..2]
   • Controls level of synchronization implied by IO operations
   • 0 - no synchronization
   • 1 by default - reasonable level of synchronization (write->read on the same fd)
   • 2 - global synchronization of all IO operations
5. history_size=[2..7]
   • 2 by default
6. flush_memory_ms=[1000..20000]
   • This can reduce memory consumption, but may be false reports
   • Flush information about previous memory accesses every X ms
   • 0 ms by default

DSAN_OPTIONS

1. second_deadlock_stack=1
   • Report two stacks per edge instead of one (where edge destination mutex is locked and where edge source mutex is locked)
   • 0 by default

Undefined Behavior Sanitizer

TODO

Memory Sanitizer

TODO