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LCTRTS
2011
Springer

An approach to improving the structure of error-handling code in the linux kernel

12 years 6 months ago
An approach to improving the structure of error-handling code in the linux kernel
nguage does not provide any abstractions for exception handling or other forms of error handling, leaving programmers to devise their own conventions for detecting and handling errors. The Linux coding style guidelines suggest placing error handling code at the end of each function, where it can be reached by gotos whenever an error is detected. This coding style has the advantage of putting all of the error-handling code in one place, which eases understanding and maintenance, and reduces code duplication. Nevertheless, this coding style is not always applied. In this paper, we propose an automatic program transformation that transforms error-handling code into this style. We have applied our transformation to the Linux 2.6.34 kernel source code, on which it reorganizes the error handling code of over 1800 functions, in about 25 minutes. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.4 [Operating Systems]: Reliability General Terms Reliability, Design Keywords Linux, error handling, exception ...
Suman Saha, Julia L. Lawall, Gilles Muller
Added 16 Sep 2011
Updated 16 Sep 2011
Type Journal
Year 2011
Where LCTRTS
Authors Suman Saha, Julia L. Lawall, Gilles Muller
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