A Demo of ConfigFix: Semantic Abstraction of Kconfig, SAT-based Configuration, and DIMACS Export

Paper i proceeding, 2025

The Linux kernel and its huge configuration space (>15,000 features) has been a frequent study object. While the research community has developed intelligent software configuration tools, often motivated by the Linux kernel and its configuration language Kconfig, the kernel's own configurator xconfig lacks behind. Configuration conflicts need to be resolved manually, which often causes substantial overhead. Unfortunately, Kconfig is a complex and intricate language, and while transformations into propositional logic exist, they typically have shortcomings and are difficult to integrate into xconfig. We contribute research results back to the Linux community and present a demo of ConfigFix. It is a plain-C-based extension of xconfig, providing the currently most accurate abstraction of the Kconfig semantics into propositional logic. It provides configuration conflict resolution. Integrated into the xconfig UI, it offers configuration fixes to users trying to enable or disable kernel features restricted by dependencies. In addition, researchers benefit from the DIMACS export. Our demo presents the main capabilities of xconfig as well as its evaluation showing the accuracy of it.