Virtual Framework for Testing the Reliability of System Software on Embedded Systems

Abstract

System software development and testing on embedded systems can be quite difficult and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a cost effective method, namely virtual testing framework that can be used easily to test the reliability of system software. The framework consists of three layers; virtual platform layer, system software layer, and test environment layer. The virtual platform layer emulates a variety of embedded hardware on which any system software can be run and is used to verify its capability in handling faults injected by the test environment layer. We use the framework to verify the reliability of the file system and FTL (flash translation layer) by injecting faults that may be found in Flash memory. We discuss experimental results that we gained using this framework to gather post-fault behavior of the system software of interest.