Third party funded individual grant
Acronym: VAMOS
Start date : 01.10.2008
End date : 31.10.2011
Todays operating systems (as well as other system software) offer a great deal of static configurability to tailer them with respect to a specific application or hardware platform. Linux 3.2, for instance, provides (via its Kconfig modells and tools) more than twelve thousand configurable features for this purpose. Technically, the implementation of all these features is spread over multiple levels of the software generation process, including the configuration system, build system, C preprocessor, compiler, linker, and more. This enormous variablity has become unmanageable in practice; in the case of Linux it already has led to thousands of variability defects. With this term, we denote bugs and other quality issues related to the implementation of variable features. Variability defects manifest as configuration consistency and and configuration coverage issues.
In the VAMOS project, we investigate methods and tools to mitigate the situation by a holistic view on variability. Our findings have already led to more than 100 accepted patches in the Linux mainline kernel (see our EuroSys '11 and SPLC '12 papers) and an approach for the automatic tailoring of Linux server systems in order to reduce the exploitable code base (see our HotDep '12 paper). Currently we are working on the issue of configuration coverage (see our PLOS '12 paper).