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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
National Initiatives
ANR
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Members: LIP6 (Whisper), David Lo (Singapore Management University)
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Whisper members: Julia Lawall, Gilles Muller, Lucas Serrano, Van-Anh Nguyen
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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.
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General-purpose Operating Systems, such as Linux, are increasingly used to support high-level functionalities in the safety-critical embedded systems industry with usage in automotive, medical and cyber-physical systems. However, it is well known that general purpose OSes suffer from bugs. In the embedded systems context, bugs may have critical consequences, even affecting human life. Recently, some major advances have been done in verifying OS kernels, mostly employing interactive theorem-proving techniques. These works rely on the formalization of the programming language semantics, and of the implementation of a software component, but require significant human intervention to supply the main proof arguments. The VeriAmos project will attack this problem by building on recent advances in the design of domain-specific languages and static analyzers for systems code. We will investigate whether the restricted expressiveness and the higher level of abstraction provided by the use of a DSL will make it possible to design static analyzers that can statically and fully automatically verify important classes of semantic properties on OS code, while retaining adequate performance of the OS service. As a specific use-case, the project will target I/O scheduling components.