Empirical testing of Open Source Operating System Reliability: Failure analysis by co-relating event logs and crashes

Open Source Operating Systems offer many advantages over proprietary systems in studying reliability. They are now in widespread use in a variety of specialized versions but are all accessible at the source code level for analysis and modification. In this paper we look at failure analysis within distributions of the Linux operating system. Event logs are vital for failure analysis – but our experiments so far have shown that the event logs of Linux leave a lot to be desired. In this paper we describe our exploration of the event logs and the experiments we performed to look at failure analysis through event logs. We then introduce enhancements to the Linux kernel and describe the advancements that are possible in failure analysis based on these enhancements. These enhancements are again tested through a set of experiments. We analyze the results of these experiments and suggest a few paths to enhance Linux event logs for better failure analysis..