Related papers: PTracer: A Linux Kernel Patch Trace Bot

Linux kernel stable versions serve the needs of users who value stability of the kernel over new features. The quality of such stable versions depends on the initiative of kernel developers and maintainers to propagate bug fixing patches to…

Linux kernel bug repair is typically approached as a direct mapping from crash reports to code patches. In practice, however, kernel fixes undergo iterative revision on mailing lists before acceptance, with reviewer feedback shaping…

Software bugs in a production environment have an undesirable impact on quality of service, unplanned system downtime, and disruption in good customer experience, resulting in loss of revenue and reputation. Existing approaches to automated…

We describe a tracking technique for Linux devices, exploiting a new TCP source port generation mechanism recently introduced to the Linux kernel. This mechanism is based on an algorithm, standardized in RFC 6056, for boosting security by…

Open-source software is increasingly reused, complicating the process of patching to repair bugs. In the case of Linux, a distinct ecosystem has formed, with Linux mainline serving as the upstream, stable or long-term-support (LTS) systems…

In this work, we investigate the practice of patch construction in the Linux kernel development, focusing on the differences between three patching processes: (1) patches crafted entirely manually to fix bugs, (2) those that are derived…

This work proposes PatchNet, an automated tool based on hierarchical deep learning for classifying patches by extracting features from commit messages and code changes. PatchNet contains a deep hierarchical structure that mirrors the…

Patch reviewing is critical for software development, especially in distributed open-source development, which highly depends on voluntary work, such as Linux. This paper studies the past 10 years of patch reviews of the Linux memory…

Patch backporting, the process of migrating mainline security patches to older branches, is an essential task in maintaining popular open-source projects (e.g., Linux kernel). However, manual backporting can be labor-intensive, while…

Over the past 6 years, Syzbot has fuzzed the Linux kernel day and night to report over 5570 bugs, of which 4604 have been patched [11]. While this is impressive, we have found the average time to find a bug is over 405 days. Moreover, we…

This paper proposes using the Linux kernel ftrace framework, particularly the function graph tracer, to generate informative system level data for machine learning (ML) applications. Experiments on a real world encryption detection task…

Fuzzing has been studied and applied ever since the 1990s. Automated and continuous fuzzing has recently been applied also to open source software projects, including the Linux and BSD kernels. This paper concentrates on the practical…

While there is a large body of work on analyzing concurrency related software bugs and developing techniques for detecting and patching them, little attention has been given to concurrency related security vulnerabilities. The two are…

Static analysis is a powerful technique for bug detection in critical systems like operating system kernels. However, designing and implementing static analyzers is challenging, time-consuming, and typically limited to predefined bug…

Securing operating system (OS) kernel is one central challenge in today's cyber security landscape. The cutting-edge testing technique of OS kernel is software fuzz testing. By mutating the program inputs with random variations for…

Concurrency is vital for our critical software to meet modern performance requirements, yet concurrency bugs are notoriously difficult to detect and reproduce. Controlled Concurrency Testing (CCT) can make bugs easier to expose by enabling…

Regression bugs refer to situations in which something that worked previously no longer works currently. Such bugs have been pronounced in the Linux kernel. The paper focuses on regression bug tracking in the kernel by considering the time…

Programmable packet-processing devices such as programmable switches and network interface cards are becoming mainstream. These devices are configured in a domain-specific language such as P4, using a compiler to translate packet-processing…

Linux kernel evolution breaks drivers through API/ABI changes, semantic shifts, and security-hardening updates. We introduce DRIVEBENCH, an executable corpus of kernel$\rightarrow$driver co-evolution cases, and AUTODRIVER, a closed-loop,…

Code large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities on a multitude of software engineering tasks. In particular, they have demonstrated remarkable utility in the task of code repair. However, common benchmarks used to…