Static Analysis

Two tools are often used by ArduPilot to perform static analysis on the codebase, clang’s “scan build” option and Coverity.

Clang Scan-Build

You can do your own static analysis using autotest:

./Tools/autotest/autotest.py clang-scan-build

Note

You may need to install clang for this to work.

On Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install clang clang-tools

On Windows see https://clang.llvm.org/get_started.html

The results can be viewed in a web browser. The output of the scan step includes instructions, which look something like this:

scan-view tmp/scan-build-2020-08-11-114140-28761-1

On Ubuntu 18.04 one might actually need:

PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/llvm-3.8/share/scan-view scan-view-3.8 tmp/scan-build-2020-08-11-114140-28761-1

Note that the current output from this tool has several false-positives and some positives-but-should-not-be-fixed.

Things to not worry about:
  • EKF assigning to variables but not reading from them

    • these require too much review to be worthwhile in general

  • memory leaks around “new AP_Frsky_Telem(true);” and similar calls.

    • These create singletons which give another handle on the allocated memory.