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authorJohn Wickerson <j.wickerson@imperial.ac.uk>2020-11-10 11:06:38 +0000
committeroverleaf <overleaf@localhost>2020-11-23 16:28:58 +0000
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\section{Conclusion}
We have shown how existing fuzzing tools can be modified so that their outputs are compatible with HLS tools. We have used this testing framework to run 6,700 test-cases through three different HLS tools, and 3,645 test-cases through three different version of Vivado HLS to show how bugs are fixed and introduced. In total, we found at least 6 unique bugs in all the tools. These bugs include crashes as well as instances of generated designs not behaving in the same way as the original code.
-One can always question how much bugs found by fuzzers really \emph{matter}, given that they are usually found by combining language features in ways that are vanishingly unlikely to happen `in the wild'~\cite{marcozzi+19}. This question is especially pertinent for our particular context of HLS tools, which are well-known to have restrictions on the language features that they handle. Nevertheless, we would argue that any errors in the HLS tool are worth identifying because they have the potential to cause problems, either now or in the future. And when HLS tools \emph{do} go wrong (or indeed any sort of compiler for that matter), it is particularly infuriating for end-users because it is so difficult to identify whether the fault lies with the tool or with the program it has been given to compile.
+One can always question how much bugs found by fuzzers really \emph{matter}, given that they are usually found by combining language features in ways that are vanishingly unlikely to happen `in the wild'~\cite{marcozzi+19}. This question is especially pertinent for our particular context of HLS tools, which are well-known to have restrictions on the language features that they handle. \JW{I added the following two sentences, based on our rebuttal -- please check.} Nevertheless, we would argue that although the \emph{test-cases} we generated do not resemble the programs that humans write, the \emph{bugs} that we exposed using those test-cases are real, and could also be exposed by realistic programs. Moreover, it is worth noting that HLS tools not exclusively provided with human-written programs to compile: they are often fed programs that have been automatically generated by another compiler. Ultimately, we believe that any errors in an HLS tool are worth identifying because they have the potential to cause problems, either now or in the future. And when HLS tools \emph{do} go wrong (or indeed any sort of compiler for that matter), it is particularly infuriating for end-users because it is so difficult to identify whether the fault lies with the tool or with the program it has been given to compile.
Further work could be done on supporting more HLS tools, especially ones that claim to prove that their output is correct before terminating. This could give an indication on how effective these proofs are, and how often they are actually able to complete their equivalence proofs during compilation in a feasible timescale.