Set compiler and options. Make sure to enable at least basic optimizations to avoid excessive stack usage. Also enable some debug output to get meaningful stack traces.
export CC=clang
export CFLAGS=" \
-O1 -gline-tables-only \
-fsanitize=fuzzer-no-link,address,undefined \
-fno-sanitize-recover=all \
-DFUZZING_BUILD_MODE_UNSAFE_FOR_PRODUCTION"
Other options that can improve stack traces:
-fno-omit-frame-pointer
-fno-inline
-fno-optimize-sibling-calls (disables tail call optimization)
Build libxml2 with instrumentation:
./configure --without-python
make
Run fuzzers:
make -C fuzz fuzz-xml
Most fuzzers inject malloc failures to cover code paths handling these errors. This can lead to surprises when debugging crashes. You can set the macro XML_FUZZ_MALLOC_ABORT in fuzz/fuzz.c to make the fuzz target abort at the malloc invocation which would fail. This tells you if and where a malloc failure was injected.
Some fuzzers also test whether malloc failures are reported. To debug failures which aren’t reported, it’s helpful to enable XML_FUZZ_MALLOC_ABORT to see which allocation failed. Debugging failures which are erroneously reported can be harder. If the report goes through xmlRaiseMemoryError, you can abort() there to get a stack trace.