Biblio

The authors' industry experiences suggest that compiler warnings, a lightweight version of program analysis, are valuable early bug detection tools. Significant costs are associated with patches and security bulletins for issues that could have been avoided if compiler warnings were addressed. Yet, the industry's attitude towards compiler warnings is mixed. Practices range from silencing all compiler warnings to having a zero-tolerance policy as to any warnings. Current published data indicates that addressing compiler warnings early is beneficial. However, support for this value theory stems from grey literature or is anecdotal. Additional focused research is needed to truly assess the cost-benefit of addressing warnings.

The paper introduces a method of efficient partial firmware update with several advantages compared to common methods. The amount of data to transfer for an update is reduced, the energetic efficiency is increased and as the method is designed for over the air update, the radio spectrum occupancy is decreased. Herein described approach uses Lua scripting interface to introduce updatable fragments of invokable native code. This requires a dedicated memory layout, which is herein introduced. This method allows not only to distribute patches for deployed systems, but also on demand add-ons. At the end, the security aspects of proposed firmware update system is discussed and its limitations are presented.