More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Public Access

A study of modern Linux API usage and compatibility: what to support when you're supporting

Authors:

Nafees Ahmed Abdul,

Donald E. PorterAuthors Info & Claims

EuroSys '16: Proceedings of the Eleventh European Conference on Computer Systems

Article No.: 16, Pages 1 - 16

https://doi.org/10.1145/2901318.2901341

Published: 18 April 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a study of Linux API usage across all applications and libraries in the Ubuntu Linux 15.04 distribution. We propose metrics for reasoning about the importance of various system APIs, including system calls, pseudo-files, and libc functions. Our metrics are designed for evaluating the relative maturity of a prototype system or compatibility layer, and this paper focuses on compatibility with Linux applications. This study uses a combination of static analysis to understand API usage and survey data to weight the relative importance of applications to end users.

This paper yields several insights for developers and researchers, which are useful for assessing the complexity and security of Linux APIs. For example, every Ubuntu installation requires 224 system calls, 208 ioctl, fcntl, and prctl codes and hundreds of pseudo files. For each API type, a significant number of APIs are rarely used, if ever. Moreover, several security-relevant API changes, such as replacing access with faccessat, have met with slow adoption. Finally, hundreds of libc interfaces are effectively unused, yielding opportunities to improve security and efficiency by restructuring libc.

References

[1]

Cert c coding standards---signals. https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3903. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[2]

Debian popularity contest. http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[3]

diet libc: A libc optimized for small size. https://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/. Accessed 3/21/2016.

[4]

The embedded GNU Libc. http://www.eglibc.org/. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[5]

The GNU C library. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[6]

musl libc. http://www.musl-libc.org/. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[7]

Ubuntu popularity contest. http://popcon.ubuntu.com/by_inst. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[8]

uClibc. https://www.uclibc.org/. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[9]

wait4 man page. http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/wait4.2.html. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[10]

J. J. Amor, J. M. Gonzalez-Barahona, G. Robles, and I. Herraiz. Measuring libre software using debian 3.1 (sarge) as a case study: Preliminary results. UPGRADE - The European Journal for the Informatics Professional, VI(3):13--16, 06 2005.

[11]

J. J. Amor, G. Robles, and J. M. González-Barahona. Measuring Woody: The size of Debian 3.0. CoRR, abs/cs/0506067, 2005.

[12]

J. J. Amor, G. Robles, J. M. González-Barahona, and I. Herraiz. From pigs to stripes: A travel through Debian. In Proceedings of the DebConf5 (Debian Annual Developers Meeting), Helsinki, Finland, 07 2005.

[13]

J. Appavoo, M. A. Auslander, D. Da Silva, D. Edelsohn, O. Krieger, M. Ostrowski, B. S. Rosenburg, R. W. Wisniewski, and J. Xenidis. Providing a Linux API on the scalable K42 kernel. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pages 323--336, 2003.

[14]

V. Atlidakis, J. Andrus, R. Geambasu, D. Mitropoulos, and J. Nieh. POSIX abstractions in modern operating systems: The old, the new, and the missing. In Proceedings of the ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2016.

Digital Library

[15]

A. Aviram, S.-C. Weng, S. Hu, and B. Ford. Efficient system-enforced deterministic parallelism. In Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), pages 1--16, 2010.

Digital Library

[16]

A. Baumann, D. Lee, P. Fonseca, L. Glendenning, J. R. Lorch, B. Bond, R. Olinsky, and G. C. Hunt. Composing OS extensions safely and efficiently with Bascule. In Proceedings of the ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2013.

Digital Library

[17]

A. Belay, A. Bittau, A. Mashtizadeh, D. Terei, D. Mazières, and C. Kozyrakis. Dune: Safe user-level access to privileged CPU features. In Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), pages 335--348, 2012.

Digital Library

[18]

F. Bellard. QEMU, a fast and portable dynamic translator. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pages 41--46, 2005.

Digital Library

[19]

T. Bergan, N. Hunt, L. Ceze, and S. D. Gribble. Deterministic process groups in dos. In Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), pages 1--16, 2010.

Digital Library

[20]

N. Borisov, R. Johnson, N. Sastry, and D. Wagner. Fixing races for fun and profit: How to abuse atime. In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, pages 303--314, 2005.

Digital Library

[21]

X. Cai, Y. Gui, and R. Johnson. Exploiting unix file-system races via algorithmic complexity attacks. Oakland, pages 27--41, 2009.

Digital Library

[22]

H. Chen, D. Wagner, and D. Dean. Setuid demystified. In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, pages 171--190, 2002.

Digital Library

[23]

O. F. de Sousa, M. A. de Menezes, and T. J. P. Penna. Analysis of the package dependency on Debian GNU/Linux. Journal of Computational Interdisciplinary Sciences, 1(2):127--133, 03 2009.

[24]

S. Denis. Linux distributions and applications analysis during linux standard base development. Proceedings of the Spring/-Summer Young Researchers. Colloquium on Software Engineering, 2, 2008.

[25]

J. Dike. User Mode Linux. Prentice Hall, 2006.

[26]

R. Divacky. Linux emulation in FreeBSD. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-emulation/, 03 2015. Accessed on 3/21/2016.

[27]

J. R. Douceur, J. Elson, J. Howell, and J. R. Lorch. Leveraging legacy code to deploy desktop applications on the web. In Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2008.

Digital Library

[28]

H. Franke, R. Russel, and M. Kirkwood. Fuss, futexes and furwocks: Fast userlevel locking in Linux. In Ottawa Linux Symposium, 2002.

[29]

J. M. Gonzalez-Barahona, G. Robles, M. Michlmayr, J. J. Amor, and D. M. German. Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation. Empirical Software Engineering, 14(3):262--285, 2009.

Digital Library

[30]

P. J. Guo and D. Engler. CDE: Using system call interposition to automatically create portable software packages. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2011.

Digital Library

[31]

T. Harter, C. Dragga, M. Vaughn, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau. A file is not a file: Understanding the i/o behavior of apple desktop applications. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), pages 71--83, 2011.

Digital Library

[32]

H. Härtig, M. Hohmuth, J. Liedtke, J. Wolter, and S. Schönberg. The performance of μ-kernel-based systems. SIGOPS Operating System Review, 31(5):66--77, Oct. 1997.

Digital Library

[33]

B. Jain, C.-C. Tsai, J. John, and D. E. Porter. Practical techniques to obviate setuid-to-root binaries. In Proceedings of the ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), pages 8:1--8:14, 2014.

Digital Library

[34]

S. Jana and V. Shmatikov. Memento: Learning secrets from process footprints. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), pages 143--157, 2012.

Digital Library

[35]

A. Kadav and M. M. Swift. Understanding modern device drivers. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), pages 87--98, 2012.

Digital Library

[36]

L. Lam and T.-c. Chiueh. Automatic extraction of accurate application-specific sandboxing policy. In E. Jonsson, A. Valdes, and M. Almgren, editors, Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, volume 3224 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 1--20. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2004.

[37]

R. Nguyen and R. Holt. Life and death of software packages: An evolutionary study of debian. In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research, CASCON '12, pages 192--204, 2012.

Digital Library

[38]

N. Palix, G. Thomas, S. Saha, C. Calvès, J. Lawall, and G. Muller. Faults in Linux: Ten years later. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), pages 305--318, 2011.

Digital Library

[39]

A. Pathak, Y. C. Hu, M. Zhang, P. Bahl, and Y.-M. Wang. Fine-grained power modeling for smartphones using system call tracing. In Proceedings of the ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), pages 153--168. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[40]

S. Pavel and S. Denis. Binary compatibility of shared libraries implemented in C++ on GNU/Linux systems. Proceedings of the Spring/Summer Young Researchers. Colloquium on Software Engineering, 3, 2009.

[41]

A. Ponomarenko and V. Rubanov. Automatic backward compatibility analysis of software component binary interfaces. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Science and Automation Engineering (CSAE), volume 3, pages 167--173, June 2011.

[42]

D. E. Porter, O. S. Hofmann, C. J. Rossbach, A. Benn, and E. Witchel. Operating system transactions. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), pages 161--176, 2009.

Digital Library

[43]

M. Rajagopalan, S. K. Debray, M. A. Hiltunen, and R. D. Schlichting. System call clustering: A profile directed optimization technique. Technical report, The University of Arizona, May 2003.

[44]

G. Robles and J. M. González-Barahona. From toy story to toy history: A deep analysis of Debian GNU/Linux, 2003.

[45]

G. Robles, J. M. Gonzalez-Barahona, M. Michlmayr, and J. J. Amor. Mining large software compilations over time: Another perspective of software evolution. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, MSR, pages 3--9, 2006.

Digital Library

[46]

SECure COMPuting with Filters (seccomp). https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/prctl/seccomp_filter.txt. Accessed on 3/12/2016.

[47]

H. Shacham. The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone: Return-into-libc without function calls (on the x86). In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pages 552--561, Oct. 2007.

Digital Library

[48]

J. S. Shapiro, J. M. Smith, and D. J. Farber. EROS: A fast capability system. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, SOSP '99, pages 170--185, 1999.

Digital Library

[49]

H. Singh and A. Kaur. Component compatibility in component based development. International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing, 3:535--541, 06 2014.

[50]

D. Tsafrir, T. Hertz, D. Wagner, and D. D. Silva. Portably preventing file race attacks with user-mode path resolution. Technical report, IBM Research Report, 2008.

[51]

C.-C. Tsai, K. S. Arora, N. Bandi, B. Jain, W. Jannen, J. John, H. A. Kalodner, V. Kulkarni, D. Oliveira, and D. E. Porter. Cooperation and Security Isolation of Library OSes for Multi-Process Applications. In Proceedings of the ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), pages 9:1--9:14, 2014.

Digital Library

[52]

C.-C. Tsai, Y. Zhan, J. Reddy, Y. Jiao, T. Zhang, and D. E. Porter. How to Get More Value from your File System Directory Cache. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2015.

Digital Library

[53]

X. Wang, Y.-C. Jhi, S. Zhu, and P. Liu. Detecting software theft via system call based birthmarks. In Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC '09, pages 149--158, 2009.

Digital Library

[54]

J. Wei and C. Pu. TOCTTOU vulnerabilities in UNIX-style file systems: An anatomical study. In Proceedings of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2005.

Digital Library

[55]

M. Zalewski. Delivering signals for fun and profit. 2001.

[56]

N. Zeldovich, S. Boyd-Wickizer, E. Kohler, and D. Mazières. Making information flow explicit in HiStar. In Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), pages 19--19, 2006.

Digital Library

[57]

M. Zhang and R. Sekar. Control flow integrity for cots binaries. In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, pages 337--352, 2013.

Digital Library

Cited By

Chen HMiao XJia NWang NLi YLiu NLiu YWang FHuang QLi KYang HWang HYin JPeng YXu FGavrilovska ATerry D(2024)Microkernel goes generalProceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691938.3691963(465-485)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691938.3691963
Thévenon GNguetchouang KLazri KTchana AOlivier PSchiavoni VEdinger JCao JJin Z(2024)B-Side: Binary-Level Static System Call IdentificationProceedings of the 25th International Middleware Conference10.1145/3652892.3700761(225-237)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652892.3700761
Lefeuvre HGain GBădoiu VDinca DSchiller VRaiciu CHuici FOlivier PTsafrir DMUSUVATHI MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)Loupe: Driving the Development of OS Compatibility LayersProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 110.1145/3617232.3624861(249-267)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617232.3624861
Show More Cited By

A study of modern Linux API usage and compatibility: what to support when you're supporting
1. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains

Recommendations

Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad

Today, when constructing software systems, many developers build their systems on top of frameworks. Eclipse is such a framework that has been in existence for over a decade. Like many other evolving software systems, the Eclipse platform has both ...
Analyzing the Eclipse API Usage: Putting the Developer in the Loop
CSMR '13: Proceedings of the 2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

Eclipse guidelines distinguish between two types of interfaces provided to third-party developers, i.e., APIs and non-APIs. APIs are stable and supported, while non-APIs are unstable, unsupported and discouraged as they are subject to arbitrary change ...
Linux: The Complete Reference

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

EuroSys '16: Proceedings of the Eleventh European Conference on Computer Systems

April 2016

605 pages

ISBN:9781450342407

DOI:10.1145/2901318

General Chairs:
Cristian Cadar
Imperial College London, UK
,
Peter Pietzuch
Imperial College London, UK
,
Program Chairs:
Kimberly Keeton
HP Labs
,
Rodrigo Rodrigues
Instituto Superior Técnico (Univ. Lisbon) and INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 April 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

VMware
National Science Foundation

Conference

EuroSys '16

EuroSys '16: Eleventh EuroSys Conference 2016

April 18 - 21, 2016

London, United Kingdom

Acceptance Rates

EuroSys '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 180 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 1,308 submissions, 18%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

44
Total Citations
View Citations
3,789
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)756
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)101

Reflects downloads up to 22 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Chen HMiao XJia NWang NLi YLiu NLiu YWang FHuang QLi KYang HWang HYin JPeng YXu FGavrilovska ATerry D(2024)Microkernel goes generalProceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691938.3691963(465-485)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691938.3691963
Thévenon GNguetchouang KLazri KTchana AOlivier PSchiavoni VEdinger JCao JJin Z(2024)B-Side: Binary-Level Static System Call IdentificationProceedings of the 25th International Middleware Conference10.1145/3652892.3700761(225-237)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652892.3700761
Lefeuvre HGain GBădoiu VDinca DSchiller VRaiciu CHuici FOlivier PTsafrir DMUSUVATHI MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)Loupe: Driving the Development of OS Compatibility LayersProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 110.1145/3617232.3624861(249-267)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617232.3624861
Takemura TYamamoto RSuzaki K(2024)TEE-PA: TEE Is a Cornerstone for Remote Provenance Auditing on Edge Devices With Semi-TCBIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.336634412(26536-26549)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3366344
Aldea CBocu RSolca R(2023)Real-Time Monitoring and Management of Hardware and Software Resources in Heterogeneous Computer Networks through an Integrated System ArchitectureSymmetry10.3390/sym1506113415:6(1134)Online publication date: 23-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/sym15061134
Castes CGhosn A(2023)Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating SystemsProceedings of the 12th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3623759.3624548(26-33)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623759.3624548
Ahmad AOu BLiu CZhang XFonseca PAamodt TSwift MJerger N(2023)Veil: A Protected Services Framework for Confidential Virtual MachinesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 410.1145/3623278.3624763(378-393)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623278.3624763
Gu JShi JSu HLi WZang BGuan HChen H(2023)Understanding and Mitigating Twin Function Misuses in Operating System KernelIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2023.324036572:8(2181-2193)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2023.3240365
Cui JShinde SSen SSaxena PYuan P(2022)Dynamic Binary Translation for SGX EnclavesACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/353286225:4(1-40)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532862
Xing TBarbalace AOlivier PKaraoui MWang WRavindran B(2022)H-Container: Enabling Heterogeneous-ISA Container Migration in Edge ComputingACM Transactions on Computer Systems10.1145/352445239:1-4(1-36)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524452
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents