Coverity cov-build crashes in latest Debian testing (8.5 and 8.7 versions)

Question

Is anyone else having Coverity builder crash (segfault) under latest Debian testing?

Last time I was able to use it (am building coverity report for Blender) was in late October, with 8.5 version (iirc). When I tried again in late November, cov-build command crashes immediately reporting a segfault, even with mere cov-build --help command. Tried to update to latest version then (8.5.0.5), same result, and tried today 8.7.0 release, same result.

Answer 1

We've been seeing reports of this for certain new builds of the Linux kernel, however we've been unable to reproduce the issue to-date. Have you engaged with Coverity's support? It's likely we will need detailed system configuration information in order to narrow down the culprit here - something has changed in the latest kernel/utilities/libraries that isn't playing nice with Coverity.

Answer 2

Issue here is that Coverity scan tools are built for rather old Linux compatibility, and newer ones have the emulation of deprecated vsyscall disabled (since kernel 4.8).

So you have to start your kernel with the vsyscall=emulate parameter (easiest solution under Debian testing with Grub2 is to add this to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT setting of /etc/default/grub, and then run grub-update).

Thanks to the [email protected] team for their quick and precise answer! :)