Third party funded individual grant
Acronym: CADOS
Start date : 01.05.2014
Todays operating systems (as well as other system software) offer a great deal of static configurability to tailor them with respect to a specific application or hardware platform. Linux 4.2, for instance, provides (via its Kconfig models and tools) more than fifteen 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 variability has become unmanageable in practice; in the case of Linux it already has led to thousands of variability defects within the lifetime of Linux. With this term, we denote bugs and other quality issues related to the implementation of variable features. Variability defects manifest as configuration consistency and configuration coverage issues.
In the CADOS project, we investigate scalable methods and tools to grasp the variability on every layer within the configuration and implementation space, visualize and analyze it and, if possible, adjust it while maintaining a holistic view on variability.