[$] Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Drivers are a consistent source of kernel bugs, at least partly due to lessreview, but also because drivers are typically harder for tools toanalyze. A team from the University of California, Santa Barbara has setout to change that with a static-analysis tool called DR. CHECKER. In a paper[PDF] presented at the recent 26th USENIXSecurity Symposium, the team introduced the tool and the results ofrunning it on nine production Linux kernels. Those results were ratherencouraging: "it correctly identified 158 critical zero-day bugs with an overall precision of 78%".