How to use AddressSanitizer with Wine?

[Alex Henrie]

Dear oenologists,

I would like to use GCC's AddressSanitizer [1] to investigate a memory
corruption bug in Wine. There must be a way to do it because I see
multiple references to "ASan" in the Wine commit log in commits from
this year.[2] I found some instructions on the WineHQ wiki,[3] but I
get a myriad of linker errors when I try to follow them.

What Linux distributions can successfully compile Wine with libasan?
Are there special steps not mentioned in the wiki? Does
AddressSanitizer work with MinGW, or only with non-PE builds?

I'd love to get AddressSanitizer working myself, but even if I can't,
thanks to Bernhard and Nikolay for using it to fix a lot of bugs
already.

-Alex

[1] https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizer
[2] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/commits/master?search=ASan
[3] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Building-Wine#memory--address-ch...

[Bernhard Übelacker]

Hello Alex,

Am 26.04.25 um 23:18 schrieb Alex Henrie:
> Dear oenologists,
>
> I would like to use GCC's AddressSanitizer [1] to investigate a memory
> corruption bug in Wine. There must be a way to do it because I see
> multiple references to "ASan" in the Wine commit log in commits from
> this year.[2] I found some instructions on the WineHQ wiki,[3] but I
> get a myriad of linker errors when I try to follow them.
>
> What Linux distributions can successfully compile Wine with libasan?
> Are there special steps not mentioned in the wiki? Does
> AddressSanitizer work with MinGW, or only with non-PE builds?
>
> I'd love to get AddressSanitizer working myself, but even if I can't,
> thanks to Bernhard and Nikolay for using it to fix a lot of bugs
> already.
>
> -Alex
>
> [1] https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizer
> [2] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/commits/master?search=ASan
> [3] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Building-Wine#memory--address-ch...

Thanks for asking, I fear I should have provide
this information long time ago.

I fear GCC is not able to achieve this on PE side currently.
The wiki references may be just for the Unix side of things.

A few months ago I felt brave and tried to get some changes
into llvm-project about function interception,
and that went better than I had hoped.

So I found Martin Storsjö's llvm-mingw, and building wine with it
works well. As a side project I tried to build wine with ASan(PE-side)
enabled, and this worked (with currently plenty of hacks) also quite well.

For enabling ASan(PE) I collected some "notes to myself", which I hope
are enough accurate to enable someone else to reproduce the results.
Currently I try to push my current state for each wine release, like in [7].

In [8][9] is the output when running the conformance test suite from
such an ASan(PE) enabled tree.

Thanks to Nikolay some of the issues could be fixed immediately.

Unfortunately I have one patch with LLVM still in progress,
therefore a self-built LLVM would be needed, to build wine.
But this is just needed for HEAP_REALLOC_IN_PLACE_ONLY re-allocations,
and running with "windows_hook_rtl_allocators=0" should not be affected by this,
and that way building wine from the plain nightly llvm-mingw package should work.

This notes might be better placed in the wiki, but I currently
don't know how is the best way to enter it there.

Please let me know any issues or uncertainties in my description.

Kind regards,
Bernhard

[4] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50993
[5] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52386
[6] https://gitlab.winehq.org/bernhardu/wine/-/blob/asan-pe_2025-04-05_wine-10.6...
[7] https://gitlab.winehq.org/bernhardu/wine/-/tree/asan-pe_2025-04-05_wine-10.6...
[8] https://gitlab.winehq.org/bernhardu/wine/-/tree/asan-pe_2025-04-05_wine-10.6...
[9] https://gitlab.winehq.org/bernhardu/wine/-/tree/asan-pe_2025-04-05_wine-10.6...