Automatic verification of active device drivers

Abstract

We develop a practical solution to the problem of automatic verification of the interface between device drivers and the operating system. Our solution relies on a combination of improved driver architecture and verification tools. Unlike previous proposals for verification-friendly drivers, our methodology supports drivers written in C and can be implemented in any existing OS. Our Linuxbased evaluation shows that this methodology amplifies the power of existing model checking tools in detecting driver bugs, making it possible to verify properties that are beyond the reach of traditional techniques.

Effective Detection of Sleep-in-atomic-context Bugs in the Linux Kernel

“…To prevent concurrency bugs in the OS kernel, several improved kernel module architectures have been proposed, typically for device drivers. The active driver architecture [2,48] runs each driver in a separate kernel thread, and all communication between the driver and kernel is performed using message passing. This architecture can serialize the concurrent accesses to the driver and eliminate the possibility of concurrency bugs.…”

Towards a greater reliability of driver/device communication around the system life cycle through a contract‐based protocol specification

“…On the other hand, semi-formal verification techniques through the use of formalisms applied in conjunction with simulation have proved to be reasonably efficient in this respect. Several approaches have dealt with failure in device drivers by performing formal or semi-formal verification during the development phase [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…1, pp. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) further challenge is revealed, since it is necessary to verify the two domains together.…”