Dead or Alive

摘要

Variability management in operating systems is an error-prone and tedious task. This is especially true for the Linux operating system, which provides a specialized tool called Kconfig for users to customize kernels from an impressive amount of selectable features. However, the lack of a dedicated tool for kernel developers leads to inconsistencies between the implementation and the variant model described by Kconfig. This results in real bugs like features that cannot be either enabled or disabled at all; the so called zombie features.