Stress, Performance, and Interoperability Testing

To help ensure that a driver performs well, that driver should be subjected to vigorous stress testing. For example, running single threads through a driver does not test locking logic or conditional variables that have to wait. Device operations should be performed by multiple processes at once to cause several threads to execute the same code simultaneously.

Techniques for performing simultaneous tests depend upon the driver. Some drivers require special testing applications, while starting several UNIX commands in the background is suitable for others. Appropriate testing depends upon where the particular driver uses locks and condition variables. Testing a driver on a multiprocessor machine is more likely to expose problems than testing on a single-processor machine.

Interoperability between drivers must also be tested, particularly because different devices can share interrupt levels. If possible, configure another device at the same interrupt level as the one being tested. A stress test can determine whether the driver correctly claims its own interrupts and operates according to expectations. Stress tests should be run on both devices at once. Even if the devices do not share an interrupt level, this test can still be valuable. For example, consider a case in which serial communication devices experience errors when a network driver is tested. The same problem might be causing the rest of the system to encounter interrupt latency problems as well.

Driver performance under these stress tests should be measured using UNIX performance-measuring tools. This type of testing can be as simple as using the time(1) command along with commands to be used in the stress tests.