Improving Driver Robustness: an Evaluation of the Devil Approach - Inria - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique Access content directly
Conference Papers Year : 2001

Improving Driver Robustness: an Evaluation of the Devil Approach

Abstract

To keep up with the frantic pace at which devices come out, drivers need to be quickly developed, debugged and tested. We have recently introduced a new approach to improve driver robustness based on an Interface Definition Language, named Devil. Devil allows a high-level definition of the communication of a device. A compiler automatically checks the consistency of a Devil specification and generates stubs that include run-time checks. In this paper, we use mutation analysis to evaluate the improvement in driver robustness offered by Devil. To do so, we have injected programming errors using mutation analyses into Devil based Linux drivers and the original C drivers. We assess how early errors can be caught in the development process, by measuring whether errors are detected either at compile time or at run time. The results of our experiments on the IDE Linux disk driver show that nearly 3 times more errors are detected in the Devil driver than in the original C driver.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Reveillere-Muller_dsn2001.pdf (86.42 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin : Publisher files allowed on an open archive
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-00350218 , version 1 (06-01-2009)
hal-00350218 , version 2 (23-04-2010)

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : hal-00350218 , version 2

Cite

Laurent Réveillère, Gilles Muller. Improving Driver Robustness: an Evaluation of the Devil Approach. The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Jul 2001, Göteborg, Sweden, Sweden. pp.131--140. ⟨hal-00350218v2⟩
149 View
157 Download

Share

Gmail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn More