A robust approach for variability extraction from the Linux build system

Dietrich, Christian; Tartler, Reinhard; Schröder-Preikschat, Wolfgang; Lohmann, Daniel

doi:10.1145/2362536.2362544

Cited by 69 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…LVAT [15] and Undertaker ( [18], [20], [2]) are the main examples of such tools. We chose to rely on Undertaker for its convenient wrapping of kdump, allowing us to use the same tools that are also used by the Linux kernel development team.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extracting feature model changes from the Linux kernel using FMDiff

Dintzner

Deursen

Pinzger

2014

Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems

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The Linux kernel feature model has been studied as an example of large scale evolving feature model and yet details of its evolution are not known. We present here a classification of feature changes occurring on the Linux kernel feature model, as well as a tool, FMDiff, designed to automatically extract those changes. With this tool, we obtained the history of more than twenty architecture specific feature models, over ten releases and compared the recovered information with Kconfig file changes. We establish that FMDiff provides a comprehensive view of feature changes and show that the collected data contains promising information regarding the Linux feature model evolution.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extracting feature model changes from the Linux kernel using FMDiff

Dintzner

Deursen

Pinzger

2014

Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems

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“…9 or this message posted by Linus Torvalds in the Linux kernel mailing list "I didn't compile-test any of it, I don't do the crosscompile thing, and maybe I missed something." 10 We find ourselves in a situation in which, following a feature modification, identifying the impact across architectures is non-trivial, and cross-compilation, the first mean to validate such changes, is not applied consistently. There are many developers working on the kernel, and a few not crosscompiling might not affect the quality of the end product.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…LVAT [35] and Undertaker [10,38,42] are the main examples of such tools. We chose to rely on Undertaker for its convenient wrapping of kconfigdump, allowing us to use the same tools that are also used by the Linux kernel development team.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysing the Linux kernel feature model changes using FMDiff

2015

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Evolving a large scale, highly variable system is a challenging task. For such a system, evolution operations often require to update consistently both their implementation and its feature model. In this context, the evolution of the feature model closely follows the evolution of the system. The purpose of this work is to show that fine-grained feature changes can be used to guide the evolution of the highly variable system. In this paper, we present an approach to obtain fine-grained feature model changes with its supporting tool "FMDiff". Our approach is tailored for Kconfig-based variability models and proposes a feature change classification detailing changes in features, their attributes and attribute values. We apply our approach to the Linux kernel feature model, extracting feature changes occurring in sixteen official releases. In contrast to previous studies, we found that feature modifications are responsible for most of the changes. Then, by taking advantage of the multi-platform aspect of the Linux kernel, we observe the effects of a feature change across the different architecture-specific feature models of the kernel. We found that between 10 and 50 % of feature changes impact all the architecture-specific feature

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“…For every item in this list, the preconditions described by the conditional blocks around the code have to hold as well as possible dependencies described by KCONFIG. We use tools described in previous work [7,19,22] which are able to determine the preconditions described in KCONFIG and provide an option to look up the preconditions for a given line.…”

Section: Principle Of Operationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous work [7], however, has shown the portability of the extractors we used for Linux to other software product lines such as the BusyBox UNIX utility suite [5] and the FIASCO microkernel [9], requiring only little effort.…”

Section: Generalization Beyond Linuxmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic feature selection in large-scale system-software product lines

2014

Self Cite

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System software can typically be configured at compile time via a comfortable feature-based interface to tailor its functionality towards a specific use case. However, with the growing number of features, this tailoring process becomes increasingly difficult: As a prominent example, the Linux kernel in v3.14 provides nearly 14 000 configuration options to choose from. Even developers of embedded systems refrain from trying to build a minimized distinctive kernel configuration for their device -and thereby waste memory and money for unneeded functionality.In this paper, we present an approach for the automatic use-case specific tailoring of system software for special-purpose embedded systems. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on the example of Linux by generating tailored kernels for well-known applications of the Rasperry Pi and a Google Nexus 4 smartphone. Compared to the original configurations, our approach leads to memory savings of 15-70 percent and requires only very little manual intervention.

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A robust approach for variability extraction from the Linux build system

Cited by 69 publications

References 23 publications

Extracting feature model changes from the Linux kernel using FMDiff

Extracting feature model changes from the Linux kernel using FMDiff

Analysing the Linux kernel feature model changes using FMDiff

Automatic feature selection in large-scale system-software product lines

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