Related papers: Beyond Crash-to-Patch: Patch Evolution for Linux K…

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…

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…

Repairing system crashes discovered by kernel fuzzers like Syzkaller is a critical yet underexplored challenge in software engineering. While recent works have introduced Large Language Model (LLM) based agents for Linux kernel…

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…

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 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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

False-positive bug reports represent a significant yet underexplored challenge in the development and maintenance of the Linux kernel. They occur when correct system behavior is mistakenly flagged as a defect, consuming developer effort…

Detecting and fixing bugs are two of the most important yet frustrating parts of the software development cycle. Existing bug detection tools are based mainly on static analyzers, which rely on mathematical logic and symbolic reasoning…

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…

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…

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…

Reference counting bugs in Linux kernel drivers can lead to severe resource mismanagement and security vulnerabilities. We introduce DrvHorn, a novel automated tool to detect these bugs by reducing reference counting verification to an…

Security updates create a short but important window in which defenders and attackers can compare vulnerable and patched software. Yet in many operational settings, the most accessible artifacts are binary packages rather than source…

We propose, BanditRepair, a system that systematically explores and assesses a set of possible runtime patches. The system is grounded on so-called bandit algorithms, that are online machine learning algorithms, designed for constantly…

Out-of-tree kernel patches are essential for adapting the Linux kernel to new hardware or enabling specific functionalities. Maintaining and updating these patches across different kernel versions demands significant effort from experienced…

Millions of open-source projects with numerous bug fixes are available in code repositories. This proliferation of software development histories can be leveraged to learn how to fix common programming bugs. To explore such a potential, we…