Code Quality Tools

The systemd project has a number of code quality tools set up in the source tree and on the github infrastructure. Here’s an incomprehensive list of the available functionality:

  1. Use meson test -C build to run the unit tests. Some tests are skipped if no privileges are available, hence consider also running them with sudo meson test -C build. A couple of unit tests are considered “unsafe” (as they change system state); to run those too, build with meson setup -Dtests=unsafe. Finally, some unit tests are considered to be very slow, build them too with meson setup -Dslow-tests=true. (Note that there are a couple of manual tests in addition to these unit tests.) (Also note: you can change these flags for an already set up build tree, too, with “meson configure -C build -D…”.)

  2. Use ./test/run-integration-tests.sh to run the full integration test suite. This will build OS images with a number of integration tests and run them using systemd-nspawn and qemu. Requires root.

  3. Use ./coccinelle/run-coccinelle.sh to run all Coccinelle semantic patch scripts we ship. The output will show false positives, hence take it with a pinch of salt.

  4. Use ./tools/find-double-newline.sh recdiff to find double newlines. Use ./tools/find-double-newline.sh recpatch to fix them. Take this with a grain of salt, in particular as we generally leave foreign header files we include in our tree unmodified, if possible.

  5. Similar use ./tools/find-tabs.sh recdiff to find TABs, and ./tools/find-tabs.sh recpatch to fix them. (Again, grain of salt, foreign headers should usually be left unmodified.)

  6. Use ninja -C build check-api-docs to compare the list of exported symbols of libsystemd.so and libudev.so with the list of man pages. Symbols lacking documentation are highlighted.

  7. Use ninja -C build update-hwdb and ninja -C build update-hwdb-autosuspend to automatically download and import the PCI, USB, and OUI databases and the autosuspend quirks into the hwdb.

  8. Use ninja -C build update-man-rules to update the meson rules for building man pages automatically from the docbook XML files included in man/.

  9. There are multiple CI systems in use that run on every github pull request submission or update.

  10. Coverity is analyzing systemd main branch in regular intervals. The reports are available online.

  11. OSS-Fuzz is continuously fuzzing the codebase. Reports are available online. It also builds coverage reports daily.

  12. Our tree includes .editorconfig, .dir-locals.el and .vimrc files, to ensure that editors follow the right indentiation styles automatically.

  13. When building systemd from a git checkout the build scripts will automatically enable a git commit hook that ensures whitespace cleanliness.

  14. CodeQL analyzes each PR and every commit pushed to main. The list of active alerts can be found here.

  15. Each PR is automatically tested with Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behavior Sanitizer. See Testing systemd using sanitizers for more information.

  16. Fossies provides source code misspelling reports. The systemd report can be found here.

Access to Coverity and oss-fuzz reports is limited. Please reach out to the maintainers if you need access.