docs/code_coverage.md

# Code Coverage in Chromium

### Coverage Dashboard: [https://chromium-coverage.appspot.com/]

Table of contents:

- [Coverage Script](#coverage-script)
- [Workflow](#workflow)
  * [Step 0 Download Tooling](#step-0-download-tooling)
  * [Step 1 Build](#step-1-build)
  * [Step 2 Create Raw Profiles](#step-2-create-raw-profiles)
  * [Step 3 Create Indexed Profile](#step-3-create-indexed-profile)
  * [Step 4 Create Coverage Reports](#step-4-create-coverage-reports)
- [Contacts](#contacts)
- [FAQ](#faq)

Chromium uses Clang source-based code coverage. This [documentation] explains
how to use Clang’s source-based coverage features in general.

In this document, we first introduce a code coverage script that can be used to
generate code coverage reports for Chromium code in one command, and then
describe the code coverage reports generation workflow.

## Coverage Script
The [coverage script] automates the process described below and provides a
one-stop service to generate code coverage reports in just one command.

This script is currently supported on Linux, Mac, iOS and ChromeOS platforms.

Here is an example usage:

```
$ gn gen out/coverage \
    --args='use_clang_coverage=true is_component_build=false dcheck_always_on=true'
$ python tools/code_coverage/coverage.py \
    crypto_unittests url_unittests \
    -b out/coverage -o out/report \
    -c 'out/coverage/crypto_unittests' \
    -c 'out/coverage/url_unittests --gtest_filter=URLParser.PathURL' \
    -f url/ -f crypto/
```
The command above builds `crypto_unittests` and `url_unittests` targets and then
runs them individually with their commands and arguments specified by the `-c` flag.
For `url_unittests`, it only runs the test `URLParser.PathURL`. The coverage report
is filtered to include only files and sub-directories under `url/` and `crypto/`
directories.

Aside from automating the process, this script provides visualization features to
view code coverage breakdown by directories and by components, for example:

### Directory View

![code coverage report directory view]

### Component View

![code coverage report component view]

### Source View

When you click on a particular source file in one of the views above, you can check
per-line coverage information such as

- Uncovered / Covered line fragments, lines and code blocks. This information can be
useful to identify areas of code that lack test coverage.
- Per-line hit counts indicating how many times this line was hit by all tested targets.
This information can be useful to determine hot spots in your code.
- Potentially dead code. See [dead code example].

![code coverage source view]

## Workflow
This section presents the workflow of generating code coverage reports using two
unit test targets in Chromium repo as an example: `crypto_unittests` and
`url_unittests`, and the following diagram shows a step-by-step overview of the
process.

![code coverage generation workflow](images/code_coverage_workflow.png)

### Step 0 Download Tooling
Generating code coverage reports requires llvm-profdata and llvm-cov tools.
Currently, these two tools are not part of Chromium’s Clang bundle,
[coverage script] downloads and updates them automatically, you can also
download the tools manually ([link]).

### Step 1 Build
In Chromium, to compile code with coverage enabled, one needs to add
`use_clang_coverage=true` and `is_component_build=false` GN flags to the args.gn
file in the build output directory. Under the hood, they ensure
`-fprofile-instr-generate` and `-fcoverage-mapping` flags are passed to the
compiler.

```
$ gn gen out/coverage \
    --args='use_clang_coverage=true is_component_build=false'
$ gclient runhooks
$ autoninja -C out/coverage crypto_unittests url_unittests
```

### Step 2 Create Raw Profiles
The next step is to run the instrumented binaries. When the program exits, it
writes a raw profile for each process. Because Chromium runs tests in
multiple processes, the number of processes spawned can be as many as a few
hundred, resulting in the generation of a few hundred gigabytes’ raw
profiles. To limit the number of raw profiles, `%Nm` pattern in
`LLVM_PROFILE_FILE` environment variable is used to run tests in multi-process
mode, where `N` is the number of raw profiles. With `N = 4`, the total size of
the raw profiles are limited to a few gigabytes.

```
$ export LLVM_PROFILE_FILE=”out/report/crypto_unittests.%4m.profraw”
$ ./out/coverage/crypto_unittests
$ ls out/report/
crypto_unittests.3657994905831792357_0.profraw
...
crypto_unittests.3657994905831792357_3.profraw
```

### Step 3 Create Indexed Profile
Raw profiles must be indexed before generating code coverage reports, and this
is done using the `merge` command of `llvm-profdata` tool, which merges multiple
raw profiles (.profraw) and indexes them to create a single profile (.profdata).

At this point, all the raw profiles can be thrown away because their information
is already contained in the indexed profile.

```
$ llvm-profdata merge -o out/report/coverage.profdata \
    out/report/crypto_unittests.3657994905831792357_0.profraw
...
out/report/crypto_unittests.3657994905831792357_3.profraw
out/report/url_unittests.714228855822523802_0.profraw
...
out/report/url_unittests.714228855822523802_3.profraw
$ ls out/report/coverage.profdata
out/report/coverage.profdata
```

### Step 4 Create Coverage Reports
Finally, `llvm-cov` is used to render code coverage reports. There are different
report generation modes, and all of them require the following as input:
- Indexed profile
- All built target binaries
- All exercised source files.

For example, the following command can be used to generate per-file line-by-line
code coverage report:

```
$ llvm-cov show -output-dir=out/report -format=html \
    -instr-profile=out/report/coverage.profdata \
    -object=out/coverage/url_unittests \
    out/coverage/crypto_unittests
```

For more information on how to use llvm-cov, please refer to the [guide].

## Contacts

### Reporting problems
For any breakage report and feature requests, please [file a bug].

### Mailing list
For questions and general discussions, please join [code-coverage group].

## FAQ

### Can I use `is_component_build=true` for code coverage build?

Yes, code coverage instrumentation works with both component and non-component
builds. Component build is usually faster to compile, but can be up to several
times slower to run with code coverage instrumentation. For more information,
see [crbug.com/831939].

### I am getting some warnings while using the script, is that fine?

Usually this is not a critical issue, but in general we tend not to have any
warnings. Please check the list of [known issues], and if there is a similar
bug, leave a comment with the command you run, the output you get, and Chromium
revision you use. Otherwise, please [file a new issue] providing the same
information.

### How do crashes affect code coverage?

If a crash of any type occurs (e.g. Segmentation Fault or ASan error), the
crashing process might not dump coverage information necessary to generate
code coverage report. For single-process applications (e.g. fuzz targets), that
means no coverage might be reported at all. For multi-process applications, the
report might be incomplete. It is important to fix the crash first. If this is
happening only in the coverage instrumented build, please [file a bug].

### How do assertions affect code coverage?

If a crash is caused by CHECK or DCHECK, the coverage dump will still be written
on the disk ([crrev.com/c/1172932]). However, if a crashing process calls the
standard [assert] directly or through a custom wrapper, the dump will not be
written (see [How do crashes affect code coverage?]).

### Is it possible to obtain code coverage from a full Chromium build?

Yes, with some important caveats. It is possible to build `chrome` target with
code coverage instrumentation enabled. However, there are some inconveniences
involved:

* Linking may take a while
* The binary is huge (~4GB)
* The browser "works", but is noticeably slow and laggy
* The sandbox needs to be disabled (`--no-sandbox`)

For more information, please see [crbug.com/834781].

### Why do we see significantly different coverage reported on different revisions?

There can be two possible scenarios:

* It can be a one time flakiness due to a broken build or failing tests.
* It can be caused by extension of the test suite used for generating code
coverage reports. When we add new tests to the suite, the aggregate coverage
reported usually grows after that.

### How can I improve [coverage dashboard]?

Source code of the dashboard is not open sourced at the moment, but if you are a
Googler, you should have access to the code-coverage repository. There is a
documentation and scripts for running it locally. To get access and report
issues, ping chrome-code-coverage@ list.

### Why is coverage for X not reported or unreasonably low, even though there is a test for X?

There are several reasons why coverage reports can be incomplete or incorrect:

* A particular test is not used for code coverage report generation. Please
check the [test suite], and if the test is missing, upload a CL to add it.
* A test may have a build failure or a runtime crash. Please check [the logs]
for that particular test target (rightmost column on the [coverage dashboard]).
If there is any failure, please upload a CL with the fix. If you can't fix it,
feel free to [file a bug].
* A particular test may not be available on a particular platform. As of now,
only reports generated on Linux are available on the [coverage dashboard].

### Is coverage reported for the code executed inside the sandbox?

Not at the moment until [crbug.com/842424] is resolved. We do not disable the
sandbox when running the tests. However, if there are any other non-sandbox'ed
tests for the same code, the coverage should be reported from those. For more
information, see [crbug.com/842424].


[assert]: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/assert.3.html
[code-coverage group]: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/code-coverage
[code-coverage repository]: https://chrome-internal.googlesource.com/chrome/tools/code-coverage
[coverage dashboard]: https://chromium-coverage.appspot.com/
[coverage script]: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/tools/code_coverage/coverage.py
[code coverage report directory view]: images/code_coverage_directory_view.png
[code coverage report component view]: images/code_coverage_component_view.png
[code coverage source view]: images/code_coverage_source_view.png
[crbug.com/821617]: https://crbug.com/821617
[crbug.com/831939]: https://crbug.com/831939
[crbug.com/834781]: https://crbug.com/834781
[crbug.com/842424]: https://crbug.com/842424
[crrev.com/c/1172932]: https://crrev.com/c/1172932
[clang roll]: https://crbug.com/841908
[dead code example]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/ac6e09311fcc7e734be2ef21a9ccbbe04c4c4706
[documentation]: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/SourceBasedCodeCoverage.html
[file a bug]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/entry?components=Tools%3ECodeCoverage
[file a new issue]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/entry?components=Tools%3ECodeCoverage
[guide]: http://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm-cov.html
[How do crashes affect code coverage?]: #how-do-crashes-affect-code-coverage
[https://chromium-coverage.appspot.com/]: https://chromium-coverage.appspot.com/
[known issues]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=component:Tools%3ECodeCoverage
[link]: https://storage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-clang-staging/
[test suite]: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/tools/code_coverage/test_suite.txt
[the logs]: https://chromium-coverage.appspot.com/reports/latest/linux/metadata/index.html