Upgrade | EPFL Graph Search

Upgrading is the process of replacing a product with a newer version of the same product. In computing and consumer electronics an upgrade is generally a replacement of hardware, software or firmware with a newer or better version, in order to bring the system up to date or to improve its characteristics. Computing and consumer electronics Examples of common hardware upgrades include installing additional memory (RAM), adding larger hard disks, replacing microprocessor cards or graphics cards, and installing new versions of software. Many other upgrades are possible as well. Common software upgrades include changing the version of an operating system, of an office suite, of an anti-virus program, or of various other tools. Common firmware upgrades include the updating of the iPod control menus, the Xbox 360 dashboard, or the non-volatile flash memory that contains the embedded operating system for a consumer electronics device. Users can often download software and fir

Recommending software upgrades with Mojave

Ricardo Bianchini, Olivier Crameri, Willy Zwaenepoel

Software upgrades are frequent. Unfortunately, many of the upgrades either fail or misbehave. We argue that many of these failures can be avoided for users of the new version of the software by exploiting the characteristics of the upgrade and feedback from the users that have already installed it. To demonstrate that this can be achieved, we build Mojave, the first recommendation system for software upgrades. Mojave leverages data from the existing and new users, machine learning, and static and dynamic source analyses. For each new user, Mojave computes the likelihood that the upgrade will fail for him/her. Based on this value, Mojave recommends for or against the upgrade. We evaluate Mojave for three real upgrade problems with the OpenSSH suite, and one synthetic upgrade problem each in the SQLite database and the uServer Web server. Our results show that it provides accurate recommendations to the new users. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Elsevier2014

An Integrated Framework for Improving the Quality and Reliability of Software Upgrades

Olivier Crameri

Despite major advances in the engineering of maintainable and robust software over the years, upgrading software remains a primitive and error-prone activity. In this dissertation, we argue that several problems with upgrading software are caused by a poor integration between upgrade deployment, testing, and problem reporting. To support this argument, we present a characterization of software upgrades resulting from a survey we conducted of 50 system administrators. Motivated by the survey results, we present Mirage, a distributed framework for integrating upgrade deployment, testing, and problem reporting into the overall upgrade development process. Mirage's deployment subsystem allows the vendor to deploy its upgrades in stages over clusters of users sharing similar environments. Staged deployment incorporates testing of the upgrade on the users' machines. It is effective in allowing the vendor to detect problems early and limit the dissemination of buggy upgrades. Oasis, the testing subsystem of Mirage, improves on current state-of-the-art concolic and symbolic engines by implementing a new heuristic to prioritize the exploration of new or affected code in the upgrade. Furthermore, interactive symbolic execution, a new approach exposing the problem of path exploration to the tester using a graphical user interface, can be used to develop new search heuristics or manually guide testing to important areas of the source code. In spite of all of these efforts, some bugs are bound to remain in the software when it is deployed, and will be discovered and reported only later by the users. With the last component of Mirage, we consider the problem of instrumenting programs to reproduce bugs effectively, while keeping user data private. In particular, we develop static and dynamic analysis techniques to minimize the amount of instrumentation, and therefore the overhead incurred by the users, while considerably speeding up debugging. By combining up-front testing, stage deployment, testing on user machines, and efficient reporting, Mirage successfully reduces the number of problems, minimizes the number of users affected, and shortens the time needed to fix remaining problems.

EPFL2011

WR2A: A Very-Wide-Register Reconfigurable-Array Architecture for Low-Power Embedded Devices

David Atienza Alonso, Benoît Walter Denkinger, Miguel Peon Quiros

Edge-computing requires high-performance energy-efficient embedded systems. Fixed-function or custom accelerators, such as FFT or FIR filter engines, are very efficient at implementing a particular functionality for a given set of constraints. However, they are inflexible when facing application-wide optimizations or functionality upgrades. Conversely, programmable cores offer higher flexibility, but often with a penalty in area, performance, and, above all, energy consumption. In this paper, we propose VWR2A, an architecture that integrates high computational density and low power memory structures (i.e., very-wide registers and scratchpad memories). VWR2A narrows the energy gap with similar or better performance on FFT kernels with respect to an FFT accelerator. Moreover, VWR2A flexibility allows to accelerate multiple kernels, resulting in significant energy savings at the application level.

2022

An Integrated Framework for Improving the Quality and Reliability of Software Upgrades

Olivier Crameri

EPFL2011