Sparse is a tool designed to find possible coding faults in the Linux kernel. This static analysis tool differed from other such tools in that it was initially designed to flag constructs that were only likely to be of interest to kernel developers (e.g. , mixing pointers to user address space and pointers to kernel address space) Sparse contains built-in checks for known problematic and a set of annotations designed to convey semantic information about types, such as what address space pointers point to, or what locks a function acquires or releases.