A study of modern Linux API usage and compatibility

Abstract

This paper presents a study of Linux API usage across all applications and libraries in the Ubuntu Linux 15.04 distribution. We propose metrics for reasoning about the importance of various system APIs, including system calls, pseudo-files, and libc functions. Our metrics are designed for evaluating the relative maturity of a prototype system or compatibility layer, and this paper focuses on compatibility with Linux applications. This study uses a combination of static analysis to understand API usage and survey data to weight the relative importance of applications to end users.