The IceBear Tool

IceBear is a scheduler for C/C++ static analysis tools, built on Bear and Panda, supports static analyzers as follow: CSA(Clang Static Analyzer), Clang-Tidy, CppCheck, GSA(GCC Static Analyzer). IceBear can incrementally schedule these tools, with all tools supporting file-level incremental scheduling, and CSA, CppCheck, GSA supporting function-level incremental analysis (need install our modified version).

Installation

IceBear is an analysis tools scheduler, so it's neccessary that the tools you want to use is available in your environment.

If you want to enable function-level incremental scheduling, please install our modified version CSA and Cppcheck.

CSA

It is recommended to use our pre-built version CSA for the Linux x86 environment, or build CSA from source code by yourself.

cd /path/to/
tar -zxvf llvm-project-ica.tar.gz
# The path to CSA is /path/to/LLVM-19.1.5-Linux/bin/clang

Cppcheck

If you want to try function-level incremental Cppcheck, please build from source code as follows.

wget https://github.com/hribz/cppcheck-ica/archive/refs/heads/2.16.ica.zip
unzip 2.16.ica.zip
cd cppcheck-ica-2.16.ica
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/cppcheck-ica
make -j16
make install
# The path to Cppcheck is /path/to/cppcheck-ica/bin/cppcheck

IceBear

You need to install:

• clang-19
• bear
• cmake >= 3.10
• uv

Follow these commands to install IceBear:

git clone https://github.com/hribz/IceBear.git
cd IceBear
uv sync
uv run python build.py -j8
# Move icebear to any environment path.
mv icebear/icebear ~/.local/bin/

Usage

To perform static analysis on a project using IceBear, you first need to ensure that the project can be successfully built.

You can use IceBear to build the project, and the analysis will automatically start after the build is complete.

cd path/to/project
icebear --repo . --build 'make -j16' -o ice-bear-output -j 16 --inc func --analyzers csa cppcheck --clang /path/to/LLVM-19.1.5-Linux/bin/clang --cppcheck /path/to/cppcheck-ica/bin/cppcheck

You can also use Bear (Build EAR) to record the JSON Compilation Database from the build process. Then, pass the compilation database to IceBear, and IceBear will analyze the files recorded in the compilation database.

cd path/to/project
bear --output compile_commands.json -- make -j16
icebear --repo . -f compile_commands.json -o ice-bear-output -j 16 --inc func --analyzers csa cppcheck --clang --clang /path/to/LLVM-19.1.5-Linux/bin/clang --cppcheck /path/to/cppcheck-ica/bin/cppcheck

The meanings of the IceBear parameters are as follows:

• --repo: the path to the project you want to analyze.
• --build: the command to build the project.
• --build-dir: the directory to build the project, default value is current directory.
• -f: the path to the compilation database.
• -o: the directory to store the analysis results.
• -j: the number of parrallel workers to perform analysis.
• --inc: the strategy of analysis.
  • noinc: all files recorded in compilation database will be analyzed.
  • file: only files whose corresponding preprocessed file changed will be analyzed.
  • func: only changed code and affected components (e.g. AST nodes, functions) will be analyzed and generate reports.
• --analyzers: the analyzers used to do analyze, selecting from [csa, clang-tidy, cppcheck, gsa].
• --clang: the clang used to analyze (CSA is a part of clang). Please use our modified version of clang if --inc is set to func.
• --cppcheck: the cppcheck used to analyze. Please use our modified version of cppcheck if --inc is set to func.

And the analysis result can be found at the csa, cppcheck, clang-tidy folders in the output directory. The all_reports.json file provides a brief summary of all reports.