Optimizing compilers are as ubiquitous as they are crucial to software development. However, bugs in compilers are not uncommon. Among the most serious are bugs in compiler optimizations, which can cause unexpected behavior in compiled binaries. Existing approaches for detecting such bugs have focused on end-to-end compiler fuzzing, which limits their ability for targeted exploration of a compiler’s optimizations.

This paper proposes FLUX (Finding bugs with LLVM IR basedUnit test cross(X)overs), a fuzzer that is designed to generate test cases that stress compiler optimizations. Previous compiler fuzzers are overly constrained by having to construct well-formed inputs. FLUX sidesteps this constraint by using human-written unit test suites as a starting point, and then selecting random combinations of them to generate new tests. We hypothesize that tests generated this way will be able to explore new execution paths through compiler optimizations and find new bugs. Our evaluation of FLUX on LLVM indicates that it is able to increase path coverage over the baseline LLVM unit test suite and explores more edge coverage than previous work. Further, we demonstrate FLUX’s ability to generate miscompiled and crash-producing IR on LLVM’s optimizations. After a month of fuzzing, FLUX found 28 unique bugs in LLVM’s active development branch. We have reported 11 of these bugs which led to 6 of them being patched by LLVM developers. 22 of these are crashes that are triggered by well-formed input programs, and 6 of these are miscompilation bugs that silently produced incorrect code.