FoxyFeed: Forging device-level asynchronous events for kernel development

Kenji Kono, Shunsuke Miyahara, Hiroshi Yamada, Takeshi Yoshimura

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Enhancing source code quality of operating systems (OSes) is an essential and endless task in communities of commodity OSes. Unfortunately, improving the quality of the kernel code is not trivial because the kernel is large and complex. In particular, asynchronous events from peripheral devices such as interrupts make the improvement quite hard due to their low reproducibility. This paper presents Foxy Feed, a mechanism based on virtual machine monitors that helps to fix bugs caused by asynchronous device-level events. Foxy Feed forges device-level events and injects them to a debuggee kernel at the timing specified in advance, and allows us to control the timing at which asynchronous events occur for the debugging purpose. Using our prototype implementation of Foxy Feed, which is based on Xen 4.1.0, we demonstrate that Foxy Feed reproduces failures caused by device-triggered bugs in Linux and gives significant clues to the root causes.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 20th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC 2014
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages145-154
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781479964741
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014 Dec 3
Event20th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC 2014 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 2014 Nov 192014 Nov 21

Publication series

NameProceedings of IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC
ISSN (Print)1541-0110

Other

Other20th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC 2014
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period14/11/1914/11/21

Keywords

  • Device-Triggered Bug
  • Kernel Debug
  • Non-deterministic Bug
  • Virtual Machine Monitor

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software

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