Metamodel for Describing System Structure and State

Today’s software systems are very complex modular entities, made up of many interacting components that must be deployed and coexist in the same context. Modern operating systems provide the basic infrastructure for deploying and handling all the components that are used as the basic blocks for building more complex systems even though a generic and comprehensive support is far from being provided. In fact, in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) systems, components evolve independently from each other and because of the huge amount of available components and their different project origins, it is not easy to manage the life cycle of a distribution. Users are in fact allowed to choose and install a wide variety of alternatives whose consistency cannot be checked a priori to their full extent. It is possible to easily make the system unusable by installing or removing some packages that “break” the consistency of what is installed in the system itself. This document proposes a model-driven approach to simulate system upgrades in advance and to detect predictable upgrade failures, possibly by notifying the user before the system is affected. The approach relies on an abstract representation of the systems and packages which are given in terms of models that are expressive enough to isolate inconsistent configurations (e.g., situations in which installed components rely on the presence of disappeared sub-components) that are currently not expressible as inter-package relationships. Mancoosi D2.1 Metamodel for Describing System Structure and State page 2 of 102