Domain Analysis of Device Drivers Using Code Clone Detection Method

Domain analysis is the process of analyzing related software systems in a domain to find their common and variable parts. In the case of device drivers, they are highly suitable for domain analysis because device drivers of the same domain are implemented similarly for each device and each system that they support. Considering this characteristic, this paper introduces a new approach to the domain analysis of device drivers. Our method uses a code clone detection technique to extract similarity among device drivers of the same domain. To examine the applicability of our method, we investigated whole device drivers of a Linux source. Results showed that many reusable similar codes can be discerned by the code clone detection method. We also investigated if our method is applicable to other kernel sources. However, the results show that the code clone detection method is not useful for the domain analysis of all kernel sources. That is, the applicability of the code clone detection method to domain analysis is a peculiar feature of device drivers.