Documenting and automating collateral evolutions in linux device drivers

Abstract

The internal libraries of Linux are evolving rapidly, to address new requirements and improve performance. These evolutions, however, entail a massive problem of collateral evolution in Linux device drivers: for every change that affects an API, all dependent drivers must be updated accordingly. Manually performing such collateral evolutions is time-consuming and unreliable, and has lead to errors when modifications have not been done consistently.