Towards easing the diagnosis of bugs in OS code

Abstract

The rapid detection and treatment of bugs in operating systems code is essential to maintain the overall security and dependability of a computing system. A number of techniques have been proposed for detecting bugs, but little has been done to help developers analyze and treat them. In this paper we propose to combine bug-finding rules with transformations that automatically introduce bug-fixes or workarounds when a possible bug is detected. This work builds on our previous work on the Coccinelle tool, which targets device driver evolution.