Research On Backporting Device Drivers Based On Semantic Patch

Open source operating system such as Linux has many applications in lots of professional areas.Device drivers account for a significant proportion in Linux kernel.More and more program developers are now focusing on developing device drivers.With the speed of new hardwares becoming faster,the version of device drivers updates fast too.However,many users still prefer to use old Linux kernel for its stability.This raises a phenomenon that many device drivers for new hardwares can not run on old kernels directly.The paper studies the backporting of device drivers.Based on constructing the compability library,we develop some semantic patches to transform the code and make the code can run on old kernels.The paper proposes an approach to construct the compability library and finds that using semantic patches can reduce the number of patches through experiment.This increses the efficiency of backporting.Finally,the paper designes a framework for backporting device drivers with Linux git logs and this is valuable for backporting other device drivers.