Stress, Performance, and Interoperability Testing

To help ensure that the driver performs well, it should be subjected to vigorous stress testing. Running single threads through a driver will not test any of the locking logic and might not test condition variable waits. Device operations should be performed by multiple processes at once to cause several threads to execute the same code simultaneously. The way to do this depends upon the driver; some drivers will require special testing applications, but starting several UNIX commands in the background will be suitable for others. It 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. Then stress-test the driver to determine if it correctly claims its own interrupts and otherwise 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, if serial communication devices start to experience errors while a network driver is being tested, this could indicate that the network driver is causing the rest of the system to encounter interrupt latency problems.

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