Pairminer: mining for paired functions in Kernel extensions

Abstract

Drivers use kernel extension functions to manage devices, and there are often many rules on how they should be used. Among the rules, utilization of paired functions, which means that the functions must be called in pairs between two different functions, is extremely complex and important. However, such pairing rules are not well documented, and these rules can be easily violated by programmers when they unconsciously ignore or forget about them. Therefore it is useful to develop a tool to automatically extract paired functions in the kernel source and detect incorrect usages. We put forward a method called PairMiner in this paper. Heuristic and statistical mechanisms are adopted to associate with the special structure of drivers' source code, to find out paired functions between relative operations, and then to detect violations with extracted paired functions. In the experiment evaluation, we have successfully found 1023 paired functions in Linux 3.10.10. The utility of PairMiner was evaluated by analyzing the source code of Linux 2.6.38 and 3.10.10. PairMiner located 265 bugs about paired function violations in 2.6.38 which have been fixed in 3.10.10. We also have identified 1994 paired function violations which have not yet been fixed in 3.10.10. We have reported some violations as potential bugs with emails to the developers, 27 developers have replied the emails and 20 bugs have been confirmed so far, 2 violations are confirmed as false positive.