Testing the IPC Protocol for a Real-Time Operating System

International audienceIn this paper, we adapt model-based testing techniques to concurrent code, namely for test generations of an (industrial) OS kernel called PikeOS\@. Since our data-models are complex, the problem is out of reach of conventional model-checking techniques. Our solution is based on symbolic execution implemented inside the interactive theorem proving environment Isabelle/HOL extended by a plugin with test generation facilities called HOL-TestGen. As a foundation for our symbolic computing techniques, we refine the theory of monads to embed interleaving executions with abort, synchronization, and shared memory to a general but still optimized behavioral test framework. This framework is instantiated by a model of PikeOS inter-process communication system-calls. Inheriting a micro-architecture going back to the L4 kernel, the system calls of the IPC-API are internally structured by atomic actions; according to a security model, these actions can fail and must produce error-codes. Thus, our tests reveal errors in the enforcement of the security model