News

Members of the Linux Verification Center team Alexey Khoroshilov and Eugene Shatokhin has provided talks presenting our ongoing projects aimed to improve quality of Linux kernel space modules at LinuxCon Europe 2011 that took place October 26-28, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic.

After the talks we have many interesting questions and discussions. Many thanks to all for the active interest to our projects.

The slides are available from the Publications page:

• Eugene Shatokhin. "Using Dynamic Analysis To Hunt Down Problems in Kernel Modules" .
• Alexey Khoroshilov. "Linux Device Driver Verification Program" .

LinuxCon Europe 2011 and Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011 will take place October 26-28, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Members of the Linux Verification Center team Alexey Khoroshilov and Eugene Shatokhin will provide talks presenting our ongoing projects aimed to improve quality of Linux kernel space modules.

• 26 October. Eugene Shatokhin. "Using Dynamic Analysis To Hunt Down Problems in Kernel Modules".
• 27 October. Alexey Khoroshilov. "Linux Device Driver Verification Program".

Linux Verification Center announces the release of BLAST 2.7 - a new version of an open source model checker for C programs. The tool automatically checks if a C program satisfies behavioral properties of the interfaces it uses. BLAST is based on counterexample-driven automatic abstraction refinement to construct an abstract model which is model checked for safety properties.

The first version of BLAST was developed at UC Berkeley by Ranjit Jhala, Rupak Majumdar, and Gregoire Sutre and was supported by the US National Science Foundation. The BLAST 2.0 Team includes Thomas A. Henzinger, Dirk Beyer, Rupak Majumdar, and Ranjit Jhala. The latest release of the team is BLAST 2.5 of 2008.

BLAST 2.7 is a result of improvements made in BLAST 2.6 by Linux Verification Center team within Linux Driver Verification program and for the purpose to take part in Competition on Software Verification at TACAS'12.

Linux Verification Center announces the release of BLAST 2.6 - a new version of an open source model checker for C programs. The tool automatically checks if a C program satisfies behavioral properties of the interfaces it uses. BLAST is based on counterexample-driven automatic abstraction refinement to construct an abstract model which is model checked for safety properties.

The first version of BLAST was developed at UC Berkeley by Ranjit Jhala, Rupak Majumdar, and Gregoire Sutre and was supported by the US National Science Foundation. The BLAST 2.0 Team includes Thomas A. Henzinger, Dirk Beyer, Rupak Majumdar, and Ranjit Jhala. The latest release of the team is BLAST 2.5 of 2008.

BLAST 2.6 is a result of improvements made in BLAST 2.5 by Linux Verification Center team within Linux Driver Verification program.

The main improvements are as follows.

KEDR is an extensible system for dynamic analysis of kernel modules (device drivers, file system modules, etc.) in Linux. KEDR tools operate on the modules chosen by the user and can detect memory leaks, perform fault simulation and more.

Version 0.3 brings several enhancements and various bug fixes.

KEDR is an extensible system to facilitate runtime analysis of kernel modules (device drivers, file system modules, etc.) in Linux. KEDR tools operate on the modules chosen by the user and can detect memory leaks, perform fault simulation and more.

Version 0.2 brings several enhancements and various bug fixes.

Today we have released the first public version of KEDR framework.

KEDR is an extensible system to facilitate runtime analysis of kernel modules in Linux. It allows to intercept the calls that a kernel module makes to the functions exported by other modules and by the kernel proper.

KEDR-based systems can record arguments and return values of these functions to a trace, do fault simulation according to user-defined scenarios and perform many other tasks.

With the help of The Linux Foundation we took a part in Google Summer of Code 2010 with a projects titled "Linux Device Drivers Quality Inspector". A MIPT student Andrey Tretyakov mentored by Alexey Khoroshilov has developed an infrastructure to track changes in Linux Kernel's Git repository and to invoke LDV tools only for device drivers that has been changed since the previous check.

We are glad to announce that the code developed during the project was merged into the master (trunk) branch of our repository, and it is now integrated with the rest of our toolset. You can find this code in revision 51e0ca2, or browse the repository. The component is now named "LDV-Git", and the code is now maintained by the LDV team.

OLVER Core 1.5 release has been published with improvements in test reports and testing quality (see detailed release notes below).

Please use the usual links for browsing OLVER project results:

• a requirements catalog for all 1532 generic functions of the LSB Core 3.1;
• formal specifications in normal quality for 1450 functions of the LSB Core 3.1;
• formal specifications in minimal quality for 80 functions of the LSB Core 3.1;
• reports on the possible issues found by the Center in the text of LSB 3.1 and POSIX standards;
• demo examples of the tests for math.integer group of functions with annotated examples that allow understanding the technologies used and the architecture of the OLVER test suite;
• The full OLVER Core test suite release including source code and documentation.

Linux Verification Center at the Institute for System Programming of RAS announces the public availability of ABI Compliance Checker, a new tool ensuring Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatibility of different versions of a C or C++ library. The tool is aimed at helping upstream developers and distribution maintainers to make sure that any application compiled with an old version of the library will work with a newer version. ABI Compliance Checker tests whether set of public interfaces, number or data types of parameters passed to functions have changed between two versions of the library. We recommend this tool to all developers who are interested in providing libraries with stable ABI.