Automatic Verification of Message-Based Device Drivers

Abstract

We develop a practical solution to the problem of automatic verification of the interface between device drivers and the OS. Our solution relies on a combination of improved driver architecture and verification tools. It supports drivers written in C and can be implemented in any existing OS, which sets it apart from previous proposals for verification-friendly drivers. Our Linux-based evaluation shows that this methodology amplifies the power of existing verification tools in detecting driver bugs, making it possible to verify properties beyond the reach of traditional techniques

Toward compositional verification of interruptible OS kernels and device drivers

“…Note that the models of IOAPIC and LAPIC can be merged into a heterogeneous interrupt controller with the simplified transition rules that are presented in Sec. 4.…”

“…There are many lines of work in verifying device drivers based on model checking. Amani et al [4] proposed an approach to automatically verify the protocols between drivers and the operating system. Thomas Witkowski [33] and Alexey Khoroshilov [18] have verified specific protocols of some Linux drivers using the model checker SATABS and DDVERIFY.…”