Xception fault injection and robustness testing framework: a case-study of testing RTEMS

Authors

Abstract

Xception is an automated and comprehensive fault injection and robustness testing environment that enables accurate and flexible V&V (verification & validation) and evaluation of mission and business critical computer systems and computer components, with particular emphasis to software components. In this paper we focus on the new robustness testing features of Xception and illustrate them with a concrete example of robustness testing of the Real Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) performed under a European Space Agency (ESA) contract. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that robustness testing results for this real time operating system are presented. The testing revealed a significant number of critical flaws in RTEMS 4.5.0 and shows the effectiveness of Xception toolset.

Keywords

Fault injection, robustness testing

Subject

Fault Injection

Conference

VI Test and Fault Tolerance Workshop (jointly organized with the 23rd Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks (SBRC)), May 2005