Transforming The Kernel

Jonni Bidwell meets kernel refactoring guru Julia Lawall and learns that Coccinelle is French for ladybug…

- Jonni Bidwell

Julia Lawall is a researcher at Inria in Paris and a kernel developer. She works on the Coccinelle tool, which is used heavily by the kernel team to help automate code transformations. She’s also involved with the Outreachy internship program for underrepresented groups. Julia’s written code that can make sense of GCC’s notoriously opaque error messages, find relevant commits in unwieldy Git histories and much more.

We met Julia at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Prague in October 2017, where she gave a talk about porting drivers across kernel versions and the tools that can help with that.

Linux Format: Tell us a little bit about your employer, Inria, and what you do there.

Julia Lawall: Inria is a French government research organisation that’s devoted to computer science and applied math. It’s a large organisation: there are seven centres and each one has around 400 people. Each centre is divided into research groups and each research group has a particular theme.

I’m a researcher with a group focused on infrastructure software. We’re interested in things like operating systems, compilers, code verification – we want the code to be robust. We’re also involved in performance, and seeing how to help people contribute to these projects.

I’ve been at Inria since 2011. Before that I was based at the University of Copenhagen, which is where the Coccinelle project started.

LXF: So what attracted me to your talk was a long time ago I was resurrecting an old PC with a (very) old wireless card in it. The card used the Texas Instruments ACX100 chipset, and at the time no official kernel driver was available.