1373748 - make it easier to do a local TSan (thread sanitizer) build

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dana Keeler (she/her) (use needinfo) [:keeler] (on leave)]

Even with https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Thread_Sanitizer I had some trouble getting a working TSan build (details at https://mozkeeler.github.io/tsan.html ). I imagine we could make this a bit easier for devs to do. (Part of this is probably just updating the MDN documentation, but I don't actually know in what ways the things I had to do are platform/distribution/compiler version-specific (I'm on Fedora 25)). I guess I'm hoping that someone with more knowledge and experience in this sort of thing will be able to make a good call.

Comment 1

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

One part of the problem is that the document is outdated. You don't need to set CFLAGS/LDFLAGS manually, you can use --enable-thread-sanitizer, which makes things simpler.

Another part of the problem is that --enable-thread-sanitizer should disable the things that aren't compatible with it, like jemalloc, automatically.

Everything below line 31 is useless.

Comment 2

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

Possibly crazy idea: we should introduce a configure flag (e.g. --with-build-variant=) that allows users to easily opt in to a well-defined list of common build variants, like tsan. Think of it as in-tree mozconfigs except for developers (not automation) and done at the configure layer itself.