SOSP '95 Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Communications of the ACM
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IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
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As the complexity of the operating systems increases, it has been proven necessary to develop new techniques to test and verify them. L4 is a small microkernel that serves as base for numerous research and development projects. One of its design paradigms is the externalization from the kernel of the user level memory allocation policies. This externalization forces the microkernel to maintain complex structures and use convoluted algorithms to process all the required information. Some of these structures and methods form what is called the mapping database subsystem. In this paper, we present a simulation environment that extracts the complete database subsystem from the rest of the kernel, and runs on it several automated tests and verification processes. With this simulation environment, several errors were discovered in early development stages of a new mapping database. A fast feedback loop of coding and testing soon led to a final version even more stable than the old, simpler, mapping database.