A case study on state-based robustness testing of an operating system for the avionic domain
SAFECOMP'11 Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Computer safety, reliability, and security
Towards dependable clients: improving the reliability and availability of the browsers
Proceedings of the 9th Middleware Doctoral Symposium of the 13th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference
A comparative experimental study of software rejuvenation overhead
Performance Evaluation
Predicting aging-related bugs using software complexity metrics
Performance Evaluation
A survey of software aging and rejuvenation studies
ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC) - Special Issue on Reliability and Device Degradation in Emerging Technologies and Special Issue on WoSAR 2011
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Software systems running continuously for a long time tend to show degrading performance and an increasing failure occurrence rate, due to error conditions that accrue over time and eventually lead the system to failure. This phenomenon is usually referred to as \textit{Software Aging}. Several long-running mission and safety critical applications have been reported to experience catastrophic aging-related failures. Software aging sources (i.e., aging-related bugs) may be hidden in several layers of a complex software system, ranging from the Operating System (OS) to the user application level. This paper presents a software aging analysis at the Operating System level, investigating software aging sources inside the Linux kernel. Linux is increasingly being employed in critical scenarios; this analysis intends to shed light on its behaviour from the aging perspective. The study is based on an experimental campaign designed to investigate the kernel internal behaviour over long running executions. By means of a kernel tracing tool specifically developed for this study, we collected relevant parameters of several kernel subsystems. Statistical analysis of collected data allowed us to confirm the presence of aging sources in Linux and to relate the observed aging dynamics to the monitored subsystems behaviour. The analysis output allowed us to infer potential sources of aging in the kernel subsystems.