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2010-06-22

Press release: Coccinelle finds a home in the Linux kernel

One of the most promising bug finding programmes, Coccinelle, developed in a cooperation between Julia Lawall and Nicolas Palix of DIKU (Computer Science Department at University of Copenhagen) and Gilles Muller at INRIA in France has now proven its value:

As of June 14, 2010, scripts for using Coccinelle are available in the Linux source tree itself, specifically in the latest developer snapshot, known as linux-next.

Coccinelle is a tool for finding and fixing bugs in C code. It automatically detects problems and corrects errors in program code according to rules for fix functions and thus saves developers and programmers hours of tedious manual quality control of code changes.

Coccinelle has been used to develop over 600 patches that have been accepted into the Linux kernel source tree, and has been used on other open source and proprietary software projects.

Now Linux developers can easily check that the changes they make in the code are compliant with respect to the provided bug finding rules. Developers who would like to start contributing to the Linux kernel can use the same rules to find code that needs attention in the existing code base. A practical example of how to use Coccinelle

Anyone who is interested in using Coccinelle should contact Julia Lawall to discuss possible application areas, or the Coccinelle mailing list for technical assistance.

You can visit the Coccinelle project home page: http://coccinelle.lip6.fr