SCAM 2015 Keynote by Julia Lawall

Analysis and Manipulation of Linux Kernel Source Code using Coccinelle

The Linux kernel represents a very large code base that has been developed over many years, by a wide range of people, and that has stringent safety, security, and performance constraints. As such, it makes an attractive target for software researchers. Over the last 10 years, we have been developing the tool Coccinelle that provides program matching and transformation for C code, and has been designed to address the needs of the Linux kernel source code and Linux kernel developers. In this talk, we will provide an overview of Coccinelle, suggest ways in which it can be used by researchers interested in analysis and manipulation of C source code, and present highlights of a long-term study that we have carried out on the rate of faults in Linux versions going back over more than 10 years.

Julia Lawall is a Senior Researcher at Inria Paris-Rocquencourt. Her research is at the intersection of programming languages and operating systems. She develops the tool Coccinelle and has over 1000 patches in the Linux kernel based on this work. She is also the Linux kernel coordinator for the Outreachy internship program. Besides her work on Linux, she is a member of the Editorial board of Science of Computer Programming, and was a member of the SIGPLAN Executive Committee between 2012 and 2015.

This talk is the result of the combined efforts of many people, most notably Gilles Muller and Nicolas Palix.