Speaker
Description
Part 1: The Many Implementations of Kconfig
Kconfig, a language originally introduced for use in the Linux build system, has grown to over 300,000 lines of usage in Linux itself, and has been adopted by many other open source projects, like coreboot, BusyBox, Zephyr, and more. However, Kconfig does not have a specification like other languages, and is implemented differently in each of these projects that uses it. We take a look at how these implementations differ, and discuss the feasibility of a unified spec and implementation.
Part 2: Tooling
Researchers continue to be fascinated by the Linux kernel’s usage of Kconfig, and academic papers have been regularly published on it for almost 20 years now. And with these papers often comes tools. Some examples include detecting dead configuration options, unmet dependency bugs, and generating config files that compile affected lines of C code from patches, among many others. We take a look at which tools are still being maintained post-publication, and discuss interesting tools that have since been abandoned. Can they be picked up by the open source community? And what kind of tooling is still missing?