WG211/M2Lawall

Title: Tarantula: Killing Driver Bugs Before They Hatch

Julia Lawall

Abstract: The Linux operating system is undergoing continual evolution to improve performance, meet new hardware requirements, and improve the software architecture. Evolution in the kernel and generic driver modules often triggers the need for collateral evolutions in specific device drivers. Such collateral evolutions are tedious, because of the large number of device drivers, and error-prone, because of the complexity of the code modifications involved. We are developing an automatic tool, Tarantula, to aid in this process. In this talk, we examine some recent evolutions in Linux and the collateral evolutions they trigger, and assess the corresponding requirements on Tarantula.

[Joint work with Gilles Muller and Richard Urunuela]