Libabigail is a new infrastructure for semantic analysis of ELF binaries containing C or C++ programs that has emerged lately. It powers command line tools like ‘abidiff’, which let users compare ABI changes between two different versions of a given ELF binary by analyzing just the binary and its ancillary debug information.
The result of the binary comparison is a kind of hierarchical ‘diff’ which shows changes up to the types of the interfaces that constitute the ABI of an ELF program.
This interactive talk intents to spark discussions around the idea of having a libabigail-based tool specifically targeted to comparing the ABI of two Linux Kernel binary trees and how it could be useful to maintainers of the stable kernel tree. The main goal of such a tool would be to show the ABI differences between two kernels, in terms of which function or variable — part of the ABI exposed by the kernel to its modules — changed and what the details of the changes are.
This interactive talk will present what libabigail and its associated tools can do today, and how the library can be used to build an hypothetical “kabidiff” new tool. Discussions are going to be very welcome so please make sure to attend.
Dodji Seketeli, Red Hat
[slideshare id=66780685&doc=kr2016-kabidiff-161005200551]