Test Harness Description

Hardened device drivers are resilient to potential hardware faults. You must test the resilience of device drivers as part of the driver development process. This type of testing requires that the driver handle a wide range of typical hardware faults in a controlled and repeatable way. The driver hardening test harness enables driver developers to simulate such hardware faults in software.

The test harness intercepts calls from the driver to various DDI routines, then corrupts the result of the calls as if the hardware had caused the corruption. In addition, the harness allows for corruption of accesses to specific registers as well as definition of more random types of corruption.

The driver must perform all I/O accesses by using DDI routines to comply with the Solaris DDI/DKI.

The test harness can generate test scripts automatically by tracing all register accesses as well as direct memory access (DMA) and interrupt usage during the running of a specified workload. A script is generated that reruns that workload while injecting a set of faults into each access.

The driver tester must create additional test cases to force the driver down more obscure failure paths. The tester should also remove duplicate test cases from the generated scripts.

The test harness is implemented as a device driver called bofi, which stands for bus_ops fault injection, and two user-level utilities, th_define(1M) and th_manage(1M).

The test harness does the following:

• Validates compliant use of Solaris DDI services

• Facilitates controlled corruption of programmed I/O (PIO) and DMA requests and interference with interrupts, thus simulating faults that occur in the hardware managed by the driver

• Facilitates simulation of failures in the data path between the CPU and the device, which are reported from parent nexus drivers

• Monitors a driver's access during a specified workload and generates fault-injection scripts