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Abstract
Drivers are becoming the larger part of operating systems kernels. Previous
studies have shown that device drivers seem to be one of the most important
sources of operating systems misbehavior. Their failure can have significant
impact on the kernel and cause significant damages to the system as
a whole. To objectively characterize the impact of faulty drivers,
we have carried out a series of fault injection experiments. To conduct
these experiments we have targeted the DPI (Driver Programming Interface)
that implements the way device drivers interact with the kernel. Faults
are injected on the parameters of these kernel core functions. This
allows for the derivation of useful results about the failure modes
induced and thus characterization of the robustness of a target kernel
with respect to faulty drivers. The information gathered also enables
to improve these interaction facilities.
Keywords: Operating systems, evaluation,
testing, fault injection, characterization of failure modes.
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