Incremental development of environment model and requirement specifications for subsystems of operating system monolithic kernels

I. S. Zakharov, E. M. Novikov

Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: Methods and tools for automated static verification aim at detecting all violations of checked requirements in target programs under certain assumptions even without complete models and formal specifications. The given feature form a basis of the suggested method for incremental development of environment model and requirement specifications for subsystems of operating system monolithic kernels. This method was implemented on top of static verification framework Klever. It was evaluated by checking the Linux kernel TTY subsystem. During this study some Klever components were improved. Besides, we fixed some existing and developed new environment model and requirement specifications. Almost all made changes also helps at static verification of loadable modules of the Linux kernel. Developers of automated static verification tool CPAchecker fixed several issues that we revealed and reported during the research. Overall developed specifications allowed to increase function coverage of the TTY subsystem from 5% to 83%. Moreover, we revealed 7 bugs in loadable modules verified together with the TTY subsystem.

Keywords: operating system, monolithic kernel, software quality, static verification, formal specification, program decomposition, environment model.

DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2017-29(6)-2

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