A Kconfig Translation to Logic with One-Way Validation System

Fernández-Amorós, David; Heradio, Rubén; Mayr-Dorn, Christoph; Egyed, Alexander

doi:10.1145/3336294.3336313

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…As part of the TypeChef infrastructure [40], Kästner implemented KConfigReader [39]. Recently, Fernandez-Amoros et al [30] proposed another translation which, however, ignores Tristate features (i.e., a large part of the semantics).…”

Section: -Kconfig Language and Configurator Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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ConfigFix: Interactive Configuration Conflict Resolution for the Linux Kernel

Franz

Berger

Fayaz³

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)

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Highly configurable systems are highly complex systems. The Linux kernel is arguably one of the most well-known examples. Given its vast configuration space, researchers have used it to conduct many empirical studies as well as to build dedicated methods and tools for analyzing, configuring, testing, optimizing, and maintaining the kernel. However, despite a large body of work, mainly bug fixes that were the result of such research made it back into the kernel's source tree. Unfortunately, Linux users still struggle with kernel configuration and resolving configuration conflicts, since the kernel largely lacks automated support. Additionally, there are technical and community requirements for supporting automated conflict resolution in the kernel, for example, using a pure C-based solution that uses only compatible third-party libraries (if any).With the aim of contributing back to the Linux community, we present Co n f ig Fi x , a tooling that we integrated with the Linux kernel configurator, that is purely implemented in C, and that is finally a working solution able to produce fixes for configuration conflicts. We describe our experiences of building upon the large body of research done on the kernel configuration mechanisms as well as how we designed and realized Co n f ig Fix while adhering to the Linux kernel's community requirements and standards. Co n f ig Fi x not only helps Linux kernel users obtain their desired configuration, but our implemented semantic abstraction provides the basis for many of the above techniques supporting kernel configuration.

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Section: -Kconfig Language and Configurator Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With the exception of one tool [30], all produce propositional formulas in conjunctive normal form (required by SAT solvers) and typically apply a Tseitin transformation [76], which introduces auxiliary variables to avoid formula explosion.…”

Section: -Kconfig Language and Configurator Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

ConfigFix: Interactive Configuration Conflict Resolution for the Linux Kernel

Franz

Berger

Fayaz³

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)

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“…After manual inspection, we discarded work related to the analysis of tools to parse files from the build system [10], the tools themselves [19,39] and tooled approaches that do not characterize anomalies [3,6,8,13,37]. We also dismiss work on the formal semantics of the Kconfig files [40,52,53] and translation to boolean logic [11], which do not report anomalies. Finally, we dismiss preliminary work completed by later publications of the same authors [47] and journal extensions [32,46].…”

Section: Diversity Of Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite this large body of work, the variability of the Linux kernel is still a subject of new studies (e.g., translating configurations from the Kconfig to propositional logic [11], using symbolic execution to recover build conditions in Kbuild files [33]), tools (e.g., interactively resolving configuration conflict [12]), and challenges (e.g., deriving a BDD [48]). Problem statement.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing the diversity of analyses on the Linux kernel variability

Mortara

Collet

2021

Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A

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As its variability management architecture is complex, the Linux kernel is a constant subject of study for analyzing different aspects of its variability. It relies on a configuration-aware build system, preprocessor directives in the code, and a configuration tool. While many studies have focused on detecting anomalies within these parts or between them, all concepts and denominations are different among contributions, with similar properties devised with varied formalisms, or with no easy relationship between them. This actually hampers the understanding of all variability issues and proposed analyses, as well as their application to other highly configurable systems. In this paper, we analyse the different properties that have been studied on the variability of the kernel and propose a formalism based on the generic concepts of configurator and derivator. We instantiate them to represent the Kconfig, the Kbuild, and CPP in a unified model that enables to represent all the consistency properties. With this model, we manage to categorize the main related studies, establishing their coverage on the defined properties, showing also overlapping and divergences between studies. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software product lines.

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“…These options cannot be arbitrarily combined, as every option typically comes with constraints with respect to several other options. Constraints are specified in KConfig [21], but can be translated into feature models or propositional logic [11,32,34,37,40,49,57,65,68,71,77,[81][82][83]. Whenever we analyze the Linux kernel for errors, ignoring those constraints would lead to false positives.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A BDD for Linux?

Thüm

2020

Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Systems and Software Product Line: Volume a - Volume A

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What is the number of valid configurations for Linux? How to generate uniform random samples for Linux? Can we create a binary decision diagram for Linux? It seems that the product-line community tries hard to answer such questions for Linux and other configurable systems. However, attempts are often not published due to the publication bias (i.e., unsuccessful attempts are not published). As a consequence, researchers keep trying by potentially spending redundant effort. The goal of this challenge is to guide research on these computationally complex problems and to foster the exchange between researchers and practitioners.

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A Kconfig Translation to Logic with One-Way Validation System

Cited by 12 publications

References 23 publications

ConfigFix: Interactive Configuration Conflict Resolution for the Linux Kernel

ConfigFix: Interactive Configuration Conflict Resolution for the Linux Kernel

Capturing the diversity of analyses on the Linux kernel variability

A BDD for Linux?

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