Injecting faults into the kernel

Injecting faults into the kernel

Posted Dec 14, 2006 16:52 UTC (Thu) by PaulMcKenney (subscriber, #9624)
In reply to: Injecting faults into the kernel by simlo
Parent article: Injecting faults into the kernel

The really cool thing about fault injection is that it can make errors happen more quickly. In one example some years back, a race-condition bug that was taking about 24 hours to reproduce under heavy load was flushed out in under 10 minutes using fault-injection code. Think about this a bit. How long would you have to test the original system to be 99.99% confident that you had in fact fixed the bug? Now, how about the fault-injected system?

Let's just say that your users will likely be a lot happier with you if you are using fault injection.

That said, I also really like unit tests as well, kernel/rcutorture.c being a case in point.

The fact is that we need both fault injection and unit tests.

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