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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR

  • ITrans - awarded in 2016, duration 2017 - 2020

  • Members: LIP6 (Whisper), David Lo (Singapore Management University)

  • Coordinator: Julia Lawall

  • Whisper members: Julia Lawall, Gilles Muller, Lucas Serrano, Van-Anh Nguyen

  • Funding: ANR PRCI, 287,820 euros.

  • Objectives:

    Large, real-world software must continually change, to keep up with evolving requirements, fix bugs, and improve performance, maintainability, and security. This rate of change can pose difficulties for clients, whose code cannot always evolve at the same rate. This project will target the problems of forward porting, where one software component has to catch up to a code base with which it needs to interact, and back porting, in which it is desired to use a more modern component in a context where it is necessary to continue to use a legacy code base, focusing on the context of Linux device drivers. In this project, we will take a history-guided source-code transformation-based approach, which automatically traverses the history of the changes made to a software system, to find where changes in the code to be ported are required, gathers examples of the required changes, and generates change rules to incrementally back port or forward port the code. Our approach will be a success if it is able to automatically back and forward port a large number of drivers for the Linux operating system to various earlier and later versions of the Linux kernel with high accuracy while requiring minimal developer effort. This objective is not achievable by existing techniques.