AdaCore Blog

24 entries tagged with #Fixed Point

by Jon Andrew

CuBit: A General-Purpose Operating System in SPARK/Ada

Last year, I started evaluating programming languages for a formally-verified operating system. I've been developing software for a while, but only recently began work in high integrity software development and formal methods. There are several operating system projects, like the SeL4 microkernel and the Muen separation kernel, that make use of formal verification. But I was interested in using a formally-verified language to write a general-purpose OS - an environment for abstracting the underlying hardware while acting as an arbiter for running the normal applications we're used to.

by Pat Rogers

From Ada to Platinum SPARK: A Case Study for Reusable Bounded Stacks

This blog entry describes the transformation of an Ada stack ADT into a completely proven SPARK implementation that relies on static verification instead of run-time enforcement of the abstraction’s semantics. We will prove that there are no reads of unassigned variables, no array indexing errors, no range errors, no numeric overflow errors, no attempts to push onto a full stack, no attempts to pop from an empty stack, that subprogram bodies implement their functional requirements, and so on. As a result, we get a maximally robust implementation of a reusable stack abstraction providing all the facilities required for production use.

#SPARK    #Ada    #Transitioning to SPARK   

by Pat Rogers

Making an RC Car with Ada and SPARK

As a demonstration for the use of Ada and SPARK in very small embedded targets, I created a remote-controlled (RC) car using Lego NXT Mindstorms motors and sensors but without using the Lego computer or Lego software. I used an ARM Cortex System-on-Chip board for the computer, and all the code -- the control program, the device drivers, everything -- is written in Ada. Over time, I’ve upgraded some of the code to be in SPARK. This blog post describes the hardware, the software, the SPARK upgrades, and the repositories that are used and created for this purpose.

#Ada    #SPARK    #Robotics   

by Allan Ascanius , Per Dalgas Jakobsen

Winning DTU RoboCup with Ada and SPARK

The Danish Technical University has a yearly RoboCup where autonomous vehicles solve a number of challenges. We participated with RoadRunner, a 3D printed robot with wheel suspension, based on the BeagleBone Blue ARM-based board and the Pixy 1 camera with custom firmware enabling real-time line detection. Code is written in Ada and formally proved correct with SPARK at Silver level.

#Robotics    #Ada    #SPARK   

by Joffrey Huguet

Using SPARK to prove 255-bit Integer Arithmetic from Curve25519

In 2014, Adam Langley, a well-known cryptographer from Google, wrote a post on his personal blog, in which he tried to prove functions from curve25519-donna, one of his projects, using various verification tools: SPARK, Frama-C, Isabelle... He describes this attempt as "disappointing", because he could not manage to prove "simple" things, like absence of runtime errors. I will show in this blogpost that today, it is possible to prove what he wanted to prove, and even more.

#SPARK    #Formal Verification    #Cryptography   

by Lionel Matias

Leveraging Ada Run-Time Checks with Fuzz Testing in AFL

Fuzzing is a very popular bug finding method. The concept, very simple, is to continuously inject random (garbage) data as input of a software component, and wait for it to crash. If, like me, you find writing robustness test tedious and not very efficient in finding bugs, you might want to try fuzzing your Ada code.Here's a recipe to fuzz-test your Ada code, using American Fuzzy Lop and all the runtime checks your favorite Ada compiler can provide.Let's see (quickly) how AFL works, then jump right into fuzzing 3 open-source Ada libraries: ZipAda, AdaYaml, and GNATCOLL.JSON.

#Testing    #Ada    #VerificationTools   

by Yannick Moy

Applied Formal Logic: Searching in Strings

A friend pointed me to recent posts by Tommy M. McGuire, in which he describes how Frama-C can be used to functionally prove a brute force version of string search, and to find a previously unknown bug in a faster version of string search called quick search. Frama-C and SPARK share similar history, techniques and goals. So it was tempting to redo the same proofs on equivalent code in SPARK, and completing them with a functional proof of the fixed version of quick search. This is what I'll present in this post.

#Dev Projects    #Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

(Many) More Low Hanging Bugs

We reported in a previous post our initial experiments to create lightweight checkers for Ada source code, based on the new Libadalang technology. The two checkers we described discovered 12 issues in the codebase of the tools we develop at AdaCore. In this post, we are reporting on 6 more lightweight checkers, which have discovered 114 new issues in our codebase. This is definitely showing that these kind of checkers are worth integrating in static analysis tools, and we look forward to integrating these and more in our static analyzer CodePeer for Ada programs.

#Static Analysis    #Libadalang   

by Yannick Moy , Nicolas Roche

A Usable Copy-Paste Detector in A Few Lines of Python

After we created lightweight checkers based on the recent Libadalang technology developed at AdaCore, a colleague gave us the challenge of creating a copy-paste detector based on Libadalang. It turned out to be both easier than anticipated, and much more efficient and effective than we could have hoped for. In the end, we hope to use this new detector to refactor the codebase of some of our tools, and we expect to integrate it in our IDEs.

#Libadalang    #Static Analysis    #refactoring   

by Jorge Real

Writing on Air

While searching for motivating projects for students of the Real-Time Systems course here at Universitat Politècnica de València, we found a curious device that produces a fascinating effect. It holds a 12 cm bar from its bottom and makes it swing, like an upside-down pendulum, at a frequency of nearly 9 Hz. The free end of the bar holds a row of eight LEDs. With careful and timely switching of those LEDs, and due to visual persistence, it creates the illusion of text... floating in the air!

#STM32    #Ravenscar    #Ada    #Makers    #Embedded Development   

by Fabien Chouteau , Arnaud Charlet , Yannick Moy

SPARK Tetris on the Arduboy

One of us got hooked on the promise of a credit-card-size programmable pocket game under the name of Arduboy and participated in its kickstarter in 2015. The kickstarter was successful (but late) and delivered  the expected working board in mid 2016. Of course, the idea from the start was to program it in Ada , but this is an 8-bits AVR microcontroller (the ATmega32u4 by Atmel) not supported anymore by GNAT Pro. One solution would have been to rebuild our own GNAT compiler for 8-bit AVR from the GNAT FSF repository and use the AVR-Ada project. Another solution, which we explore in this blog post, is to use the SPARK-to-C compiler that we developed at AdaCore to turn our Ada code into C and then use the Arduino toolchain to compile for the Arduboy board.

by Yannick Moy

GNATprove Tips and Tricks: What’s Provable for Real Now?

One year ago, we presented on this blog what was provable about fixed-point and floating-point computations (the two forms of real types in SPARK). Since then, we have integrated static analysis in SPARK, and modified completely the way floating-point numbers are seen by SMT provers. Both of these features lead to dramatic changes in provability for code doing fixed-point and floating-point computations.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

The Most Obscure Arithmetic Run-Time Error Contest

Something that many developers do not realize is the number of run-time checks that occur in innocent looking arithmetic expressions. Of course, everyone knows about overflow checks and range checks (although many people confuse them) and division by zero. After all, these are typical errors that do show up in programs, so programmers are aware that they should keep an eye on these. Or do they?

#Formal Verification    #SPARK   

by Yannick Moy

Formal Verification of Legacy Code

Just a few weeks ago, one of our partners reported a strange behavior of the well-known function Ada.Text_IO.Get_Line, which reads a line of text from an input file. When the last line of the file was of a specific length like 499 or 500 or 1000, and not terminated with a newline character, then Get_Line raised an exception End_Error instead of returning the expected string. That was puzzling for a central piece of code known to have worked for the past 10 years! But fair enough, there was indeed a bug in the interaction between subprograms in this code, in boundary cases having to do with the size of an intermediate buffer. My colleague Ed Schonberg who fixed the code of Get_Line had nonetheless the intuition that this particular event, finding such a bug in an otherwise trusted legacy piece of code, deserved a more in depth investigation to ensure no other bugs were hiding. So he challenged the SPARK team at AdaCore in checking the correctness of the patched version. He did well, as in the process we uncovered 3 more bugs.

#SPARK    #Legacy    #Formal Methods   

by Yannick Moy

GNATprove Tips and Tricks: What’s Provable for Real?

SPARK supports two ways of encoding reals in a program: the usual floating-point reals, following the standard IEEE 754, and the lesser known fixed-point reals, called this way because their precision is fixed (contrary to floating-points whose precision varies with the magnitude of the encoded number). This support is limited in some ways when it comes to proving properties of computations on real numbers, and these limitations depend strongly in the encoding chosen. In this post, I show the results of applying GNATprove on simple programs using either floating-point or fixed-point reals, to explain these differences.

#Formal Verification    #SPARK