Diagnosys: Automatic Generation of a Debugging Interface to the Linux Kernel

Tegawendé F. Bissyandé (1) , Laurent Réveillère (1) , Julia L. Lawall (2) , Gilles Muller (2)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 Regal - Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Applications

The Linux kernel does not export a stable, well-defined kernel interface, complicating the development of kernel-level services, such as device drivers and file systems. While there does exist a set of functions that are exported to external modules, this set of functions frequently changes, and the functions have implicit, ill-documented preconditions. No specific debugging support is provided. We present \textit{Diagnosys}, an approach to automatically constructing a debugging interface for the Linux kernel. First, a designated kernel maintainer ses Diagnosys to identify constraints on the use of the exported functions. Based on this information, developers of kernel services can then use Diagnosys to generate a debugging interface specialized to their code. When a service including this interface is tested, it records information about potential problems. This information is preserved following a kernel crash or hang. Our experiments show that the generated debugging interface provides useful log information and incurs a low performance penalty.

Mots clés: Diagnosys; Debugging; Wrappers; Linux; Device drivers

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Laurent Réveillère, Julia L. Lawall, Gilles Muller. Diagnosys: Automatic Generation of a Debugging Interface to the Linux Kernel. 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Sep 2012, Essen, Germany. pp.60-69, ⟨10.1145/2351676.2351686⟩. ⟨hal-00731064⟩