research-article

Finding resource-release omission faults in Linux

Authors:

Suman Saha,

Julia Lawall,

Gilles MullerAuthors Info & Claims

PLOS '11: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Article No.: 1, Pages 1 - 5

https://doi.org/10.1145/2039239.2039241

Published: 23 October 2011 Publication History

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Abstract

The management of the releasing of allocated resources is a continual problem in ensuring the robustness of systems code. Missing resource-releasing operations lead to memory leaks and deadlocks. A number of approaches have been proposed to detect such problems, but they often have a high rate of false positives, or focus only on commonly used functions. In this paper we observe that resource-releasing operations are often found in error-handling code, and that the choice of resource-releasing operation may depend on the context in which it is to be used. We propose an approach to finding resource-release omission faults in C code that takes into account these issues. We use our approach to find over 100 faults in the drivers directory of Linux 2.6.34, with a false positive rate of only 16%, well below the 30% that has been found to be acceptable to developers.

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Cited By

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DeFreez DBaldwin HRubio-González CThakur ADumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Effective error-specification inference via domain-knowledge expansionProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3338960(466-476)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3338960
Lu LArpaci-Dusseau AArpaci-Dusseau RLu S(2014)A Study of Linux File System EvolutionACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/256001210:1(1-32)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2560012
Lu LArpaci-Dusseau AArpaci-Dusseau RLu SSmith KZhou Y(2013)A study of Linux file system evolutionProceedings of the 11th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies10.5555/2591272.2591276(31-44)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2591272.2591276
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Index Terms

Finding resource-release omission faults in Linux
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Process management

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Published In

PLOS '11: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

October 2011

45 pages

ISBN:9781450309790

DOI:10.1145/2039239

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 October 2011

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SOSP '11

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INESC
SIGOPS

SOSP '11: ACM SIGOPS 23nd Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

October 23, 2011

Cascais, Portugal

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Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 32 submissions, 53%

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Cited By

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DeFreez DBaldwin HRubio-González CThakur ADumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Effective error-specification inference via domain-knowledge expansionProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3338960(466-476)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3338960
Lu LArpaci-Dusseau AArpaci-Dusseau RLu S(2014)A Study of Linux File System EvolutionACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/256001210:1(1-32)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2560012
Lu LArpaci-Dusseau AArpaci-Dusseau RLu SSmith KZhou Y(2013)A study of Linux file system evolutionProceedings of the 11th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies10.5555/2591272.2591276(31-44)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2591272.2591276
Huang MGuo SLiang XJiao X(2013)A novel resource related faults detecting approachProceedings of 2013 3rd International Conference on Computer Science and Network Technology10.1109/ICCSNT.2013.6967109(260-264)Online publication date: Oct-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSNT.2013.6967109

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