lvc/kernel-abi-tracker

A tool to monitor and analyze ABI changes in new versions of the Linux kernel

Linux Kernel ABI Tracker

This is a tool to monitor and analyze ABI changes in new versions of the Linux kernel. It is based on the ABI Dumper, ABI Compliance Checker, ABI Monitor and ABI Tracker tools. The tracker regularly checks https://www.kernel.org/ for new releases, performs backward binary compatibility analysis of all public exported symbols and data types (declared in the .ksymtab section of vmlinux + system calls) and lists all added/removed symbols.

Live demo for defconfig/x86_64: https://abi-laboratory.pro/tracker/timeline/linux/

Requires

• Perl 5
• GNU Binutils
• Elfutils
• ABI Dumper >= 0.99.19: https://github.com/lvc/abi-dumper
• ABICC >= 1.99.25: https://github.com/lvc/abi-compliance-checker
• ABI Monitor >= 1.10: https://github.com/lvc/abi-monitor
• ABI Tracker >= 1.9: https://github.com/lvc/abi-tracker

You can use the installer (https://github.com/lvc/installer) to automatically download and install required ABI tools.

Usage

Automated

1. Check for new releases, download and build:

    abi-monitor -get -build-new linux.json
   

2. Analyze ABI changes:

    abi-tracker -build linux.json
   

3. Create graph of ABI changes:

    abi-tracker -build linux.json -target graph
   

4. The report is generated to:

    ./timeline/linux/index.html
    ./compat_report/linux/
    ./objects_report/linux/
    ./graph/linux/
    ./css/
   

Manual

1. Build your kernel binaries with enabled debug info:

   • Add -Og instead of -O2 compilation flag.

   • Add the following configuration options to your .config file:

        CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=y
        CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_REDUCED=n
        CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_SPLIT=n
        CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_DWARF4=n
        CONFIG_GDB_SCRIPTS=n
     

2. Create ABI dumps of the vmlinux binary:

    abi-dumper vmlinux-V1 -kernel-export -output ABI-V1.dump -lver V1
    abi-dumper vmlinux-V2 -kernel-export -output ABI-V2.dump -lver V2
   

3. Compare ABI dumps to create report:

    abi-compliance-checker -l linux -old ABI-V1.dump -new ABI-V2.dump -limit-affected 2