On 1/26/06, Arun Srinivasan <arunlkml@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am new to device drivers. I have had a glance at Linux device drivers > book, but it talks about writing drivers only. What I need is what are the > issues I need to look into apart from just testing to see if the driver > works. How do I go about finding bugs? > > I have a set of drivers for a number of devices as serial, USB, > touchpad,audio etc. developed by someone else. So what kind of tests should > I do to find all possible bugs. Are there any books on device driver > testing? > If there was a way to "find all possible bugs" don't you think that method would have already been used? To find bugs in a driver you can either 1) read and analyze the code to try and find flaws/defects/bugs. 2) add code to the driver to print interresting values at runtime (or use a kernel-level debugger), then analyze those values and verify they are correct, and if they are not use that info to go find the bug in the source. 3) experiment with the driver and hardware - try to do unusual things with it and make it break - then when it breaks look at how it breaks, crash dumps from the kernel etc to try and locate the bug. There are not that many other ways to go about it. -- Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@xxxxxxxxx> Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html Plain text mails only, please http://www.expita.com/nomime.html -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
