This directory contains scripts and utilities to compare, track and mitigate changes to the kernel ABI. The comparison framework used is libabigail, but this might change in the future. Follow the instructions below to set up the current prerequisites.
The script bootstrap will install the system prerequisites
It will then acquire the libabigail sources and build the required binaries. At the very end the script will print instructions how to add the binaries to the local ${PATH} to be used by the remaining utilities.
You can skip this step if your host system provides a suitable version of the libabigail tooling including the binaries abidw and abidiff.
Provided a linux kernel tree with built vmlinux and kernel modules, the tool dump_abi creates an ABI representation using the selected abi tool. As of now there is only one option: 'libabigail' (default). A sample invocation looks as follows: $ dump_abi --linux-tree path/to/out --out-file /path/to/abidump.out
To ensure a consistent environment and stable toolchain, a wrapper script is provided at the topmost directory of this project: build_abi.sh. It builds the kernel using build.sh and therefore accepts the same environment variables to customize the build, such as BUILD_CONFIG, CC and the various SKIP_* variables to speed up incremental builds. Following a successful build, build_abi.sh will create an ABI dump in the DIST_DIR of the build. A sample invocation from the top of the repo tree looks as follows: $ BUILD_CONFIG=path/to/build.config build/build_abi.sh
ABI dumps created by dump_abi can be compared with diff_abi. Ensure to use the same abi-tool for dump_abi and diff_abi. A sample invocation looks as follows: $ diff_abi --baseline dump1.out --new dump2.out --report report.out
The report created is tool specific, but generally lists ABI changes detected that affect the Kernel's module interface.