KCSAN.md

Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer (KCSAN)

Status: Upstream; in mainline since 5.8

Documentation: Documentation/dev-tools/kcsan.rst

Found bugs: here

Contacts: Marco Elver <@melver>, Dmitry Vyukov <@dvyukov>

Overview

Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer (KCSAN) is a watchpoint-based dynamic race-detector for the Linux kernel.

For details, see the LWN articles:

• Concurrency bugs should fear the big bad data-race detector (part 1)
• Concurrency bugs should fear the big bad data-race detector (part 2)

And a talk:

• Data-race detection in the Linux kernel at Linux Plumbers Conference 2020

For an alternative approach based on a happens-before algorithm, see Kernel Thread Sanitizer (KTSAN).

Continuous testing & fuzzing

We have a public syzbot instance. Reports will appear on the dashboard after internal review, to keep the volume of bugs manageable (which gives us a chance to carefully react to KCSAN reports while best practices are still evolving).