SCIENCE@home

Recommending Code Changes for Automatic Backporting of Linux Device Drivers

Ferdian Thung,X. Le,D. Lo,J. Lawall

Published 2016 in IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution

ABSTRACT

Device drivers are essential components of any operating system (OS). They specify the communication protocol that allows the OS to interact with a device. However, drivers for new devices are usually created for a specific OS version. These drivers often need to be backported to the older versions to allow use of the new device. Backporting is often done manually, and is tedious and error prone. To alleviate this burden on developers, we propose an automatic recommendation system to guide the selection of backporting changes. Our approach analyzes the version history for cues to recommend candidate changes. We have performed an experiment on 100 Linux driver files and have shown that we can give a recommendation containing the correct backport for 68 of the drivers. For these 68 cases, 73.5%, 85.3%, and 88.2% of the correct recommendations are located in the Top-1, Top-2, and Top-5 positions of the recommendation lists respectively. The successful cases cover various kinds of changes including change of record access, deletion of function argument, change of a function name, change of constant, and change of if condition. Manual investigation of failed cases highlights limitations of our approach, including inability to infer complex changes, and unavailability of relevant cues in version history.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2016

  • Venue

    IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution

  • Publication date

    2016-10-02

  • Fields of study

    Computer Science, Engineering

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.1109/ICSME.2016.71
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-26 of 26 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-20 of 20 citing papers · Page 1 of 1