LotusAA — Lotus AA Engine

Overview

LotusAA is the native alias analysis framework of Lotus. It provides a modular engine with interprocedural, flow-sensitive, and field-sensitive reasoning, designed to integrate tightly with other Lotus analyses.

  • Location: include/Alias/LotusAA/

Components

  • Engine/ – Inter/intra-procedural analysis engines

  • MemoryModel/ – Points-to graph and memory modeling

  • Support/ – Configuration and utility functions

Features: Modular design for extensible pointer analysis.

Design

LotusAA organizes pointer information into a points-to graph:

  • Nodes represent memory objects and SSA values.

  • Edges represent points-to, load, store, and field relations.

  • The graph is updated by a worklist-based solver that processes IR instructions according to a set of transfer functions.

The engine can operate in several modes (e.g., whole-program vs. module local) and is designed to interoperate with higher-level analyses such as dependence and verification passes.

Usage

LotusAA is typically not run as a standalone tool. Instead, it is selected via configuration:

  • Clam / Lotus front-ends can choose LotusAA as the primary AA engine.

  • YAML configurations under yaml-configurations/ and command-line flags control whether LotusAA is enabled and how aggressively it runs.

When enabled, LotusAA registers itself with the AA wrapper so that all AA queries issued by other passes go through its results.