DETERMINING INTERFACE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM

摘要

An aspect of the present invention determines interface differences between different versions of an operating system. In one embodiment, the corresponding images of a first (older) version and a second (newer) version is inspected to identify whether access mechanism of a publicly accessible resource associated with a first interface provided by the first version is changed in the second version. Example of change in access mechanism includes a difference in the signature of function type resources, non-existence or change in the name or location of a file type resource and change in the physical file pointed to by a symbolic link type resource in the second version (as compared to that in the first version). A list of publicly accessible resources that are identified as having changed in the second version is then formed.