Related papers: An Investigation of Patch Porting Practices of the…

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…

The open-source Linux operating system is available through a wide variety of distributions, each containing a collection of installable software packages. It can be important to keep these packages as fresh as possible to benefit from new…

Logging plays a crucial role in software engineering because it is key to perform various tasks including debugging, performance analysis, and detection of anomalies. Despite the importance of log data, the practice of logging still suffers…

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…

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…

Reusing third-party software packages is a common practice in software development. As the scale and complexity of open-source software (OSS) projects continue to grow (e.g., Linux distributions), the number of reused third-party packages…

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…

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…

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…

Background: Widespread use of third-party libraries makes ecosystems like Node Package Manager (npm) critical to modern software development. However, this interconnected chain of dependencies also creates challenges: bugs in one library…

Runtime software patching aims to minimize or eliminate service downtime, user interruptions and potential data losses while deploying a patch. Due to modern software systems' high variance and heterogeneity, no universal solutions are…

Open-source software projects are foundational to modern software ecosystems, with the Linux kernel standing out as a critical exemplar due to its ubiquity and complexity. Although security patches are continuously integrated into the Linux…

System administrators, similar to end users, may delay or avoid software patches, also known as updates, despite the impact their timely application can have on system security. These admins are responsible for large, complex, amalgamated…

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…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

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…

Having built up Linux clusters to more than 1000 nodes over the past five years, we already have practical experience confronting some of the LHC scale computing challenges: scalability, automation, hardware diversity, security, and rolling…

Malicious attacks on open-source software packages are a growing concern. The discovery of the XZ Utils backdoor intensified these concerns because of the potential widespread impact. This study, therefore, explores the challenges of…

We present PTracer, a Linux kernel patch trace bot based on an improved PatchNet. PTracer continuously monitors new patches in the git repository of the mainline Linux kernel, filters out unconcerned ones, classifies the rest as bug-fixing…

Linux users expect fresh packages in the official repositories of their distributions. Yet, due to philosophical divergences, the packages available in various distributions do not all have the same degree of freshness. Users therefore need…