research-article

Configuration coverage in the analysis of large-scale system software

Authors:

Julio SinceroAuthors Info & Claims

PLOS '11: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Article No.: 2, Pages 1 - 5

https://doi.org/10.1145/2039239.2039242

Published: 23 October 2011 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

System software, especially operating systems, tends to be highly configurable. Like every complex piece of software, a considerable amount of bugs in the implementation has to be expected. In order to improve the general code quality, tools for static analysis provide means to check for source code defects without having to run actual test cases on real hardware. Still, for proper type checking a specific configuration is required so that all header include paths are available and all types are properly resolved.

In order to find as many bugs as possible, usually a "full configuration" is used for the check. However, mainly because of alternative blocks in form of #else-blocks, a single configuration is insufficient to achieve full coverage. In this paper, we present a metric for configuration coverage (CC) and explain the challenges for (properly) calculating it. Furthermore, we present an efficient approach for determining a sufficiently small set of configurations that achieve (nearly) full coverage and evaluate it on a recent Linux kernel version.

References

[1]

Bessey, A., Block, K., Chelf, B., Chou, A., Fulton, B., Hallem, S., Henri-Gros, C., Kamsky, A., McPeak, S., and Engler, D. A few billion lines of code later: using static analysis to find bugs in the real world. CACM 53 (February 2010), pp. 66--75.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Engler, D., Chen, D. Y., Hallem, S., Chou, A., and Chelf, B. Bugs as deviant behavior: a general approach to inferring errors in systems code. In 18th ACM Symp. on OS Principles (SOSP '01), ACM, pp. 57--72.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Kästner, C., Giarrusso, P. G., Rendel, T., Erdweg, S., Ostermann, K., and Berger, T. Variability-aware parsing in the presence of lexical macros and conditional compilation. In 26th ACM Conf. on OOP, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA '11), ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Kremenek, T., Twohey, P., Back, G., Ng, A., and Engler, D. From uncertainty to belief: inferring the specification within. In 7th Symp. on OS Design and Implementation (OSDI '06), USENIX, pp. 161--176.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

Liebig, J., Apel, S., Lengauer, C., Kästner, C., and Schulze, M. An analysis of the variability in forty preprocessor-based software product lines. In 32nd Int. Conf. on Software Engineering (ICSE '10), ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Oster, S., Markert, F., and Ritter, P. Automated incremental pairwise testing of software product lines. In 14th Software Product Line Conf. (SPLC '10) (2010), vol. 6287 of LNCS, Springer, pp. 196--210.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Palix, N., Thomas, G., Saha, S., Calvès, C., Lawall, J. L., and Muller, G. Faults in Linux: Ten years later. In 16th Int. Conf. on Arch. Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '11) (2011), ACM, pp. 305--318.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Spencer, H., and Collyer, G. #ifdef considered harmful, or portability experience with C News. In 1992 USENIX ATC, USENIX.

Google Scholar

[9]

Spinellis, D. A tale of four kernels. In 30th Int. Conf. on Software Engineering (ICSE '08), W. Schäfer, M. B. Dwyer, and V. Gruhn, Eds., ACM, pp. 381--390.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

Tan, L., Yuan, D., Krishna, G., and Zhou, Y./*icomment: Bugs or bad comments?*/. In 21st ACM Symp. on OS Principles (SOSP '07), ACM, pp. 145--158.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[11]

Tartler, R., Lohmann, D., Sincero, J., and Schröder-Preikschat, W. Feature consistency in compile-time-configurable system software: Facing the Linux 10,000 feature problem. In ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys Eur. Conf. on Computer Systems 2011 (EuroSys '11) (Apr. 2011), ACM, pp. 47--60.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[12]

Urban, M., Lohmann, D., and Spinczyk, O. The aspect-oriented design of the puma c/c++ parser framework. In 9th Int. Conf. on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD '10), ACM, pp. 217--221.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[13]

Zengler, C., and Küchlin, W. Encoding the Linux kernel configuration in propositional logic. In Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2010) Workshop on Configuration 2010 (2010), L. Hotz and A. Haselböck, Eds., pp. 51--56.

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Pett TKrieter SThüm TSchaefer I(2024)MulTi-Wise Sampling: Trading Uniform T-Wise Feature Interaction Coverage for Smaller SamplesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3672589(47-53)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3672589
Baranov EChakraborty SLegay AMeel KVinodchandran N(2024)A Scalable $t$t-Wise Coverage Estimator: Algorithms and ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.341991950:8(2021-2039)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3419919
Balogh ÁSzalay R(2024)On the Applicability of Static Analysis for System Software using CodeChecker2024 7th International Conference on Software and System Engineering (ICoSSE)10.1109/ICoSSE62619.2024.00011(15-22)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICoSSE62619.2024.00011
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Configuration coverage in the analysis of large-scale system software
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
      2. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
    2. Software post-development issues
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

Recommendations

Configuration coverage in the analysis of large-scale system software

System software, especially operating systems, tends to be highly configurable. Like every complex piece of software, a considerable amount of bugs in the implementation has to be expected. In order to improve the general code quality, tools for static ...
Revealing and repairing configuration inconsistencies in large-scale system software

System software typically offers a large amount of compile-time options and variability. A good example is the Linux kernel, which provides more than 10,000 configurable features, growing rapidly. This allows users to tailor it with respect to a broad ...
Ibm websphere application server v5.1 system management and configuration websphere handbook series

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

PLOS '11: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

October 2011

45 pages

ISBN:9781450309790

DOI:10.1145/2039239

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 October 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Conference

SOSP '11

Sponsor:

INESC
SIGOPS

SOSP '11: ACM SIGOPS 23nd Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

October 23, 2011

Cascais, Portugal

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 32 submissions, 53%

Upcoming Conference

SOSP '24

Sponsor:
sigops

ACM SIGOPS 30th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

November 4 - 6, 2024

Austin , TX , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

33
Total Citations
View Citations
273
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)22
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 28 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Pett TKrieter SThüm TSchaefer I(2024)MulTi-Wise Sampling: Trading Uniform T-Wise Feature Interaction Coverage for Smaller SamplesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3672589(47-53)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3672589
Baranov EChakraborty SLegay AMeel KVinodchandran N(2024)A Scalable $t$t-Wise Coverage Estimator: Algorithms and ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.341991950:8(2021-2039)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3419919
Balogh ÁSzalay R(2024)On the Applicability of Static Analysis for System Software using CodeChecker2024 7th International Conference on Software and System Engineering (ICoSSE)10.1109/ICoSSE62619.2024.00011(15-22)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICoSSE62619.2024.00011
König CRosiak KCleophas LSchaefer I(2023)True Variability Shining Through Taxonomy MiningProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3579027.3608989(182-193)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579027.3608989
Nguyen TNgo KNguyen SVo H(2023)Detecting false-passing products and mitigating their impact on variability fault localization in software product linesInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107080153(107080)Online publication date: Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107080
Jung PKang SLee J(2022)Reducing Redundant Test Executions in Software Product Line Testing—A Case StudyElectronics10.3390/electronics1107116511:7(1165)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11071165
Ghavamnia SPalit TPolychronakis MYin HStavrou ACremers CShi E(2022)C2CProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3548606.3559366(1243-1257)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3548606.3559366
Baranov EChakraborty SLegay AMeel KVariyam VDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)A scalable t-wise coverage estimatorProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510218(36-47)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510003.3510218
Han RYang CMa SMa JSun CLi JBertino EDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)Control parameters considered harmfulProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510084(462-473)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510003.3510084
Thüm TLopez-Herrejon R(2020)A BDD for Linux?Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Systems and Software Product Line: Volume A - Volume A10.1145/3382025.3414943(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3382025.3414943
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Configuration coverage in the analysis of large-scale system software

Revealing and repairing configuration inconsistencies in large-scale system software

Ibm websphere application server v5.1 system management and configuration websphere handbook series