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2015-01-19T21:23:25Z

Created page with "Increasing Automation in the Backporting of Linux Drivers Using Coccinelle Luis R. Rodriguez, Suse Labs Julia Lawall, Inria/LIP6/UPMC/Sorbonne University Software is continuall..."

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Increasing Automation in the Backporting of Linux Drivers Using
Coccinelle

Luis R. Rodriguez, Suse Labs
Julia Lawall, Inria/LIP6/UPMC/Sorbonne University

Software is continually evolving, to fix bugs and add new features.
Industry users, however, often value stability, and thus are not always
able to update their code base to the latest versions. This raises the
need to selectively backport new features to older software versions.
Traditionally, backporting has been done by cluttering the backported code
with preprocessor directives, to replace behaviors that are unsupported in
an earlier version by appropriate workarounds. This approach however
involves writing a lot of error-prone backporting code, and results in
implementations that are hard to read and maintain. We consider this
issue in the context of the Linux kernel, for which older versions are in
wide use. We present a new backporting strategy that relies on the use of
a compatability library and on code that is automatically generated using
the program transformation tool Coccinelle. This approach reduces the
amount of code that must be manually written, and thus can help the Linux
kernel backporting effort scale.

WG211/M14Lawall - Revision history

Eric: Created page with "Increasing Automation in the Backporting of Linux Drivers Using Coccinelle Luis R. Rodriguez, Suse Labs Julia Lawall, Inria/LIP6/UPMC/Sorbonne University Software is continuall..."