42 Variability Bugs in the Linux Kernel: A Qualitative Study

Feature-sensitive verification pursues effective analysis of the exponentially many variants of a program family. However, researchers lack examples of concrete bugs induced by variability, occurring in real large-scale systems. Such a collection of bugs is a requirement for goal-oriented research, serving to evaluate tool implementations of feature-sensitive analyses by testing them on real bugs. We present a qualitative study of 42 variability bugs collected from bug-fixing commits to the Linux kernel repository. We analyze each of the bugs, and record the results in a database. In addition, we provide self-contained simplified C99 versions of the bugs, facilitating understanding and tool evaluation. Our study provides insights into the nature and occurrence of variability bugs in a large C software system, and shows in what ways variability affects and increases the complexity of software bugs.