AutoFix

Abstract

C is the most widely used programming language for developing embedded software, operating systems, and device drivers. Unlike programs written in managed languages like Java, C programs rely on explicit memory management, and are therefore prone to memory leaks. Existing (static or dynamic) debugging tools only report leaks, but fixing them often requires considerable manual effort by inspecting a list of reported true and false alarms. How to develop on-demand lightweight techniques for automated leak fixing without introducing new memory errors remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce A uto F ix , a fully automated leak-fixing approach for C programs by combining static and dynamic program analyses. Given a leaky allocation site reported by a static memory leak detector, A uto F ix performs a graph reachability analysis to identify leaky paths on the value-flow slices of the program, and then conducts a liveness analysis to locate the program points for inserting fixes (i.e., the missing free calls) on the identified leaky paths. We have implemented A uto F ix in LLVM-3.5.0 and evaluated it using five SPEC2000 benchmarks and three open-source applications. Experimental results show that A uto F ix can safely fix all the memory leaks reported by a state-of-the-art static memory leak detector with small instrumentation overhead.