Testing of Operating Systems

• Main Authors: E. A. Gerlits, V. V. Kuliamin, A. V. Maksimov, A. K. Petrenko, A. V. Khoroshilov, A. V. Tsyvarev
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2018-10-01
• Series: Труды Института системного программирования РАН
• Subjects: операционная система; тестирование на основе моделей; тестирование производительности
• Online Access: https://ispranproceedings.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/767

An operating system is a base stone of any computer system. Failures and bugs in operating system impact the functionality of the system as a whole, that is why correctness and reliability of operating systems are so important. A variety of circumstances make verification and testing of operating systems a complicated issue. The list includes high dependence of operating systems on hardware, their massive internal concurrency, huge number of configuration options, required tolerance to aggressive actions of counteragents and hardware faults, a need for long continuous work without reboot, etc. The paper discusses influence of all the circumstances on testing, describes testing tools and techniques developed in ISPRAS and presents our experience of testing of various components of Linux as well as a few other real-time operating systems.