Conveners
LPC Refereed Track: Refereed Track
- Shuah Khan (The Linux Foundation)
- Kate Stewart (Linux Foundation)
LPC Refereed Track: Refereed Track
- Kate Stewart (Linux Foundation)
- Shuah Khan (The Linux Foundation)
LPC Refereed Track
- Shuah Khan (The Linux Foundation)
- Kate Stewart (Linux Foundation)
Test coverage is a measurement of how much code is executed by a given test or test suite. Current implementations in the kernel are measured against source code with tools such as "gcov" or "llvm-cov". However, source-based coverage measurements are unable to account for additional code not present in the original source, such as code inserted by the build system (compiler, linker, build...
Rust for Linux is the project adding support for the Rust language to the Linux kernel. This talk will give a high-level overview of the status and the latest news around Rust in the kernel since LPC 2024.
About a year ago, I presented the initial efforts to upstream the fundamental infrastructure needed to enable complex Rust drivers in the Linux kernel -- work that started with the Nova GPU driver. At the same time, much of the discussion around Rust in the kernel centered on concerns about (long-term) maintenance and the potential burden of supporting a second language.
Today, that...
Runtime Verification (RV) was introduced in v6.0 of the Linux Kernel and
regained some traction recently with the integration upstream of the scheduler
and rtapp models.
RV was successfully employed to model and validate a subsystem like the
scheduler. With the ongoing work on timed automata, RV monitors get the ability
to verify timing requirements of a subsystem, let's use it to...
In the Linux kernel, design intent is an emergent property. There are a number of well understood reasons for this, most notably the evolving needs of user space and the distributed nature of its development. It is also reasonable to suggest that, although remarkably complex, kernel design intent can be framed in rather simple high level terms: to behave as an arbitration layer between...
ABSTRACT
The lack of standardized documentation for the Linux kernel poses a
barrier to its adoption in safety-critical industries such as aerospace,
where compliance with standards like DO-178C is required. We explored
the use of locally trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically
generate compliant documentation for kernel modules and tools. As a case
study, we applied...
Coming up with a complex architecture to enable the Linux kernel test/CI ecosystem is no easy task. Last year, KernelCI launched its new system. Now, one year later, we want to deliver a progress report tailored for the Linux Plumbers audience.
We want to share our progress in how we are delivering results and value to our users, and what is coming up next. There has been notable progress...
This paper studies how a maintainer's tone when giving feedback to engineers affects individual productivity and output quality. We construct a novel panel dataset that links software engineers and maintainers to their email communications and code contributions on the largest open source software project, the Linux kernel. We identify tones used in the emails (e.g., toxic, polite,...
Modern workloads and systems demand more of the scheduler. A server no longer
runs one type of workload, and general purpose interactive systems like Android
and Desktop are on the rise. The same workload runs on a large variety of hardware and architectures that have different capabilities in terms of
performance and power. And the end user for the same workload and hardware
might have...
The Livepatch consistency model [1] requires the kernel to provide reliable stacktrace in order to be fully supported. On x86, the ORC unwinder provides these reliable stacktraces. However, arm64 misses the required support from objtool: it cannot generate ORC unwind tables for arm64. Prior RFCs have proposed to add this support to objtool, but feedback from the upstream community has...
TPMs have been present in modern laptops and servers for some time now, but their adoption is quite low. While operating systems do provide some security features based on TPMs (think of BitLocker on Windows or dm-verity on Linux) third party applications or libraries usually do not have TPM integrations.
One of the main reasons of low TPM adoption is that interfacing with TPMs is quite...
Ftrace - tracing in the linux kernel introduced useful features and improvements these days. These include a persistent ring buffer, function-graph tracer with arguments/return values, BTF integration, remote ring buffer, function/tracepoint probes, watch probes, and many performance enhancements on uprobes and fprobes. In this talk, we will explain these features and show how to use them in practice.
Following up on the initial hazard pointer demonstration [1], the
in-kernel hazard pointers have been significantly improved based on
extensive feedback and discussions. A status update is therefore
warranted.
Besides some improvement/fixes of the normal hazard pointers
implementation, we will demonstrate a variant of hazard pointers --
simple hazard pointers (or shazptr) -- that...
Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are becoming as common as GPUs in embedded SoCs, but Linux lacks a unified NPU subsystem. Current drivers are fragmented, vendor-specific, and often only tuned for vision inference (YOLO, ResNet). At the same time, newer workloads such as LLMs and multimodal models demand more flexible memory management, scheduling, and runtime integration.
This talk...
In Linux, testing the power management (PM) subsystem, particularly during suspend crashes, presents unique challenges. Logging mechanisms are often suspended during these events, making it difficult to capture critical information about system behavior. To address this gap, we developed a fuzzing system that combines LibAFL for fuzzing, S2E for external basic block coverage, and an input...