By Jakob Engblom
Full-system simulators like Simics provide unparalleled insight into what is going on in a target system. Indeed, better insight is one of the main features of simulation that we get regardless of what we simulate and how. In addition, if we want to, we can also exert control over the target system to make it take different execution paths than it otherwise would. Earlier this year, Ben Blum at Carnegie-Mellon University CMU presented a Master’s thesis that provides a very good example of just what can be achieved by combing the insight and control of a simulator with intelligence and domain knowledge. The system is called Landslide, and it is used to expose race conditions inside of operating-system kernels.
Landslide systematically explores the possible execution paths of the kernel in order to provoke latent bugs that might only happen very rarely in actual use of the operating system – but as we all know, such glitches are the ones that tend to be found by customers in critical situations and force engineering to spend months in reproduction attempts.
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