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Documenting and Automating Collateral Evolutions in Linux Device Drivers by Yoann Padioleau; Julia Lawall; René Rydhof Hansen; Gilles Muller is a Computer Science article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Documenting and Automating Collateral Evolutions in Linux Device Drivers about?

The internal libraries of Linux are evolving rapidly, to address new requirements and improve performance. These evolutions, however, entail a massive problem of collateral evolution in Linux device drivers: for every change that affects an API, all dependent drivers must be updated accordingly. Manually performing such collateral evolutions is time-consuming and unreliable, and has lead to errors when modifications have not been done consistently. In this paper, we present an automatic program transformation tool Coccinelle, for documenting and automating device driver collateral evolutions. Because Linux programmers are accustomed to manipulating program modifications in terms of patch files, this tool uses a language based on the patch syntax to express transformations, extending patches to semantic patches. Coccinelle preserves the coding style of the original driver, as would a human programmer. We have evaluated our approach on 62 representative collateral evolutions that were previously performed manually in Linux 2.5 and 2.6. On a test suite of over 5800 relevant driver files, the semantic patches for these collateral evolutions update over 93% of the files completely. In t

Who reads Documenting and Automating Collateral Evolutions in Linux Device Drivers?

Author

Yoann Padioleau; Julia Lawall; René Rydhof Hansen; Gilles Muller

Publisher

ACM

Published

2008

Language

EN

Field

Computer Science (Physical Sciences)