Semantic patches for documenting and automating collateral evolutions in Linux device drivers

  • Authors:
  • Yoann Padioleau;René Rydhof Hansen;Julia L. Lawall;Gilles Muller

  • Affiliations:
  • OBASCO Group, Ecole des Mines de Nantes-INRIA, France;University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Ø, Denmark;University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Ø, Denmark;OBASCO Group, Ecole des Mines de Nantes-INRIA, France

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Programming languages and operating systems: linguistic support for modern operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Developing and maintaining drivers is known to be one of the major challenges in creating a general-purpose, practically-useful operating system [1, 3]. In the case of Linux, device drivers make up, by far, the largest part of the kernel source code, and many more drivers are available outside the standard kernel source tree. New drivers are needed all the time, to give access to the latest devices. To ease driver development, Linux provides a set of driver support libraries, each devoted to a particular bus or device type. These libraries encapsulate much of the complexity of interacting with the device and the Linux kernel, and impose a uniform structure on device-specific code within a given bus or device type.