Oops! Where Did That Code Snippet Come From?

Lisong Guo (1) , Julia Lawall (1) , Gilles Muller (1)

1 Whisper - Well Honed Infrastructure Software for Programming Environments and Runtimes

A kernel oops is an error report that logs the status of the Linux kernel at the time of a crash. Such a report can provide valuable first-hand information for a Linux kernel maintainer to conduct postmortem debugging. Recently, a repository has been created that systematically collects kernel oopses from Linux users. However, debugging based on only the information in a kernel oops is difficult. We consider the initial problem of finding the offending line, i.e., the line of source code that incurs the crash. For this, we propose a novel algorithm based on approximate sequence matching, as used in bioinformatics, to automatically pinpoint the offending line based on information about nearby machine-code instructions, as found in a kernel oops. Our algorithm achieves 92% accuracy compared to 26% for the traditional approach of using only the oops instruction pointer.

Mots clés: Linux kernel; oops; debugging; sequence alignment

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]; Système d'exploitation [cs.OS]

Lisong Guo, Julia Lawall, Gilles Muller. Oops! Where Did That Code Snippet Come From?. MSR 2014 - 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, May 2014, Hyderabad, India. pp.52-61, ⟨10.1145/2597073.2597094⟩. ⟨hal-01080397⟩