Using Symbolic Execution to Analyze Linux KBuild Makefiles

The Linux kernel can be customized and built from over 13,000 configuration options, making it one of the most highly-configurable systems in modern computing. To understand how the kernel is built over these configurations, we present a symbolic execution approach to analyze the Linux kbuild system. By exploiting several unique features in kbuild, we believe our approach can provide accurate results and scale well to the high level of configuration in Linux. Preliminary results show that our prototype can handle hundreds of build files in Linux and provide interesting information about the Linux build system.