OS Driver Test Effort Reduction via Operational Profiling

Operating Systems (OS’s) constitute the operational core for computing devices, and consequently, the OS’s ability to sustain operations determines the dependability level of the provided system services. In order to facilitate their applicability to a variety of hardware platforms, OS’s have evolved into complex, componentized software entities whose key function is to provide applications access to the system’s hardware resources. Within the OS, the key components dominating the cause of OS failures are the device drivers (DDs), precisely the OS parts designed to enhance the OS’s support for hardware. Unfortunately, despite intensive efforts to elevate DD’s robustness levels by employing varied test paradigms, the existing DDs still exhibit very high failure rates. Obviously, testing the complete state space of a DD is neither technically or economically viable. Based on our empirical DD evaluations, we conjecture that the testing deficiencies are the consequence of missing key parts of the DD’s operational states in the process of testing, a situation illustrated in Fig. 1.