Recommending code changes for automatic backporting of linux device drivers

Abstract

Device drivers are essential components of any operating system (OS). They specify the communication protocol that allows the OS to interact with a device. However, drivers for new devices are usually created for a specific OS version. These drivers often need to be backported to the older versions to allow use of the new device. Backporting is often done manually, and is tedious and error prone. To alleviate this burden on developers, we propose an automatic recommendation system to guide the selection of backporting changes. Our approach analyzes the version history for cues to recommend candidate changes. We have performed an experiment on 100 Linux driver files and have shown that we can..