Quantifying Errors in Linux Kernel

Elvis' master thesis

get linux src untar linux src make mrproper make randconfig ./run.sh linuxdir

Programs and versions

$ wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/linux-3.19.tar.xz
$ wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/testing/linux-4.0-rc1.tar.xz
$ wget http://www.busybox.net/downloads/busybox-1.23.1.tar.bz2

Dependencies

• python3 (maybe older versions will work)
• bash (installed on almost all distributions)
• gcc-multilib (or build-tools, or whatever it is called in your distribution)
  • IMPORTANT - I got some compile errors, where it stated, that I needed lgcc. The interweb told me, I should have used gcc-multilib in- stead of gcc. So I have now changed it to gcc-multilib
• GNU time (not built-in bash-time or zsh-time, but GNU time)
• lzop - I got some compilation errors stating that I needed lzop (It is a kind of compression format (think zip-zop))

I will probably create a virtual machine with all the dependencies resolved, and post a link here, for everyone to download. But it is not ready yet.

In Arch:
# pacman -Syu --needed base-devel
# pacman -Syu python time gcc-multilib lzop

Scripts

make_and_get_errors.sh [tarball]

This script will untar, and compile a tarbal.

saves following files:

• config (the configuration, k)
• analyzer (which analyzer program did the errorcheck)
• buginfo (the results from the analyzer)
• time (a result of running GNU time)

categorize_errors.py

This is a python script, because I had no idea how to use sets, and arrays in Bash. I have made the script for Python 3.x but it is possible it will work for earlier versions as well. This script looks through a specific buginfo file, and scrapes all the info into an aggregate, which can easilier be read.

generate_randconfigs.sh

This script only generates the configurations. It does not compile the whole thing. This is handy for getting large amounts of random configurations.

check_randconfigs.sh

I have tried to make a script, that checks how random make randconfig has been. It prints the ratio of ENABLED/DISABLED/MODULE/NOT_SET of some feature that you specify in the bottom of this file.

Timing of the compiling process

GNU time is used in stead of the normal built-in time command. This is mainly to make it easier to get the time into a specific file, and in the format we want.