Porting OpenSolaris to LLVM

Speaker: David Gwynne

When: 10:00, Wednesday 13th February 2008

Venue: 78-420

The Parfait tool is a Static Program Analysis tool focusing on finding bugs and security vulnerabilities in system software written in the C language. It leverages the LLVM (Low-Level Virtual Machine) Compiler Infrastructure to generate a well defined intermediate representation of C source code that can be analyzed. In part, the success of the Parfait tool depends on the ability of the LLVM front end to parse a wide variety of C code.

The OpenSolaris project is Sun Microsystems' open sourced version of its Solaris operating system. Included in the OpenSolaris source tree is a wide variety of systems software that makes up an operating system, ranging from the kernel itself, to critical security infrastructure, to simple user tools. It is an interesting target for analysis due to both its size and widespread use.

This talk discusses the general challenges of compiling code with the LLVM tool chain, specific issues with compilation of the OpenSolaris code base, and the infrastructure changes implemented in OpenSolaris to support LLVM. The talk will conclude with some recommendations for improving the usability of LLVM.

Biography: David Gwynne is a Systems Programmer within the School of ITEE's IT Infrastructure Group who is studying part time with the goal of finishing his Bachelor of IT. He began studying a Bachelor of Science majoring in Applied Computer Science at the University of Southern Queensland in 2000, but abandoned that at the start of 2002 before completing the degree to pursue work in the IT industry. He has worked in several open source projects with a focus on kernel development, SMP improvements, and device drivers supporting storage hardware and 10Gb networking equipment. He recently returned to study by transferring to a Bachelor of IT at The University of Queensland. David likes cats.

Hospitality: Cristina Cifuentes

Contact: Robert Colvin (SSE seminar co-ordinator) (robert@itee.uq.edu.au)

SSE seminar web page: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~sse/Seminars.html