An empirical study of operating systems errors

By Andy Chou, Junfeng Yang, B. Chelf, Seth Hallem, Dawson R. Engler. Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2001

860 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9d0bea76adbcaf114f267e4c72237c020a1f47a

How researchers see this paper

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In Hardware and Architecture

Citations in the corpus

A Survey on Software Clone Detection Research (2007, background): “The tendency of cloning not only produces code that is difficult to maintain, but may also introduce subtle errors [51, 168, 169].”
Recovering device drivers (2004, background): “#169; 2006 ACM 0734-2071/06/1100-0333 $5.00 2003], while Linux drivers have up to seven times the bug rate of other kernel code [Chou et al. 2001].”
Debugging Operating Systems with Time-Traveling Virtual Machines (Awarded General Track Best Paper Award!) (2005, positive): “Because many OS bugs are in device drivers [7], we added the capability to UML to use unmodified real device drivers in the guest OS to drive devices on the host platform (Section 3.”
An Attack Surface Metric (2011, background): “We believe that the identification of the entry points and exit points of a system is the important first step towards the detection and prevention of such attacks.”
Passive Data Link Layer 802.11 Wireless Device Driver Fingerprinting (2006, background): “ror rates of three to seven times higher than other kernel code, making them the poorest quality code in most kernels [2].”
Have things changed now?: an empirical study of bug characteristics in modern open source software (2006, background): “Many efforts have been made to study fault related characteristics of large software systems [8, 10 , 16, 19, 28, 29, 30, 32, 36].”
The New C Standard (Excerpted material) An Economic and Cultural Commentary (2008, neutral): “Examples of such faults are provided in a study by Chou, Yang, Chelf, Hallem, and Engler[72] who investigated the history of faults in the Linux kernel (found using a variety of static analysis tools).”
DECKARD: Scalable and Accurate Tree-Based Detection of Code Clones (2007, background): “This tendency not only produces code that is difﬁcult to maintain, but may also introduce subtle errors [6,17].”
Is finding security holes a good idea? (2005, background): “• Fix Release—a patch or upgrade is released that closes the vulnerability.”
Thorough static analysis of device drivers (2006, background): “This harness leads to fewer false errors being reported but results in increased analysis times.”
Terra: a virtual machine-based platform for trusted computing (2003, background): “Empirically, driver code tends to be the worst quality code found in most kernels [16] as well as the greatest source of security bugs [8].”
Survey of Research on Software Clones (2006, background): “[22] investigated the hypothesis that if a function, file, or directory has one error, it is more likely that is has others.”
Understanding and detecting real-world performance bugs (2012, background): “Many empirical studies [7, 34, 43, 46, 53] have been conducted for traditional bugs that lead to incorrect software functionality, referred to as functional bugs.”
CP-Miner: finding copy-paste and related bugs in large-scale software code (2006, methodology): “[7] found that, in a single source file under the Linux drivers/i2o directory, 34 out of 35 errors were caused by copy-paste.”
Scheduling and locking in multiprocessor real-time operating systems (2011, background): “Given that error rates in device drivers are notoriously high (Chou et al., 2001), this lack of fault containment poses a considerable reliability hazard.”
CP-Miner: A Tool for Finding Copy-paste and Related Bugs in Operating System Code (2004, methodology): “For example, Chou et al. [10] found that in a single source (cid:2)le under the Linux drivers/i2o directory, 34 out of 35 errors were caused by copy-paste.”