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Section: New Software and Platforms
Hector (BtrLinux)
Keywords: Code quality - Evolution - Infrastructure software
Functional Description
A major source of errors in systems code is resource-release omission, which can lead to memory leaks and to crashes, if the system ends up in an inconsistent state. Currently, many tools exist that detect common patterns in software and detect faults as deviations from those patterns, but most suffer from high rates of false positives. Hector takes the novel approach of detecting inconsistencies local to a single function, and thus has been able to find over 300 faults in Linux kernel code and other C infrastructure software, with a rate of false positives of only 23%. Hector was originally the subject of the PhD thesis of Suman Saha [75]. Over the past two years, improving the robustness of the implementation of Hector has been the focus of ADT (young engineer position) BtrLinux supported by Inria, with the goal of making Hector publicly available and popularizing its use in the Linux kernel developer community. Some Linux kernel patches based on the use of Hector have been integrated into the Linux kernel, and the public release of Hector is in progress. The ADT position also involved the creation and maintenance of the website https://btrlinux.inria.fr/ as a showcase for the work of the Whisper team around Linux kernel development tools.
Building on his experience acquired in the ADT position, Quentin Lambert has recently been offered a position as an engineer at Wolfram MathCore AB.