Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Verification of Operating System Monolithic Kernels Without Extensions

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice (ISoLA 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11247))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Most widely used, general-purpose operating systems are built on top of monolithic kernels to achieve maximum performance. These monolithic kernels are written in the C/C++ programming language primarily and they may exceed one million lines of code in size even without optional extensions or loadable kernel modules such as device drivers and file systems. In addition, they evolve rapidly for supporting new functionality and due to continuous optimizations and elimination of defects. Since operating systems and, in turn, applications strongly depend on monolithic kernels, requirements for their functionality, security, reliability and performance are ones of the highest. Currently used approaches to software quality assurance help to reveal quite many defects in monolithic kernels, but none of them aims at detecting all violations of checked requirements and alongside providing guarantees that target programs always operate correctly. This paper presents a new method that is based on the software verification technique and that enables thorough checking and finding hard-to-detect faults in various versions of monolithic kernels. One of its key features is the possibility to avoid considerable efforts for configuring tools and developing specifications to obtain valuable verification results while one still can steadily improve their quality. We implemented the suggested method within software verification framework Klever and evaluated it on subsystems of the Linux monolithic kernel.

The reported study was partially supported by RFBR, research project No. 16-31-60097.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.computerworld.com/article/3050931/microsoft-windows/windows-comes-up-third-in-os-clash-two-years-early.html.

  2. 2.

    One can see files include/linux/init.h and init/main.c for details.

  3. 3.

    For instance, for the Linux kernel initialization functions can fail and return error codes. In this case, the environment model generator should not invoke exit functions if so, but can try to invoke failed initialization functions again.

  4. 4.

    http://www.bigdataopenlab.ru/about.html.

  5. 5.

    https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/1/5/137.

  6. 6.

    https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git.

References

  1. Silberschatz, A., Galvin, P.B., Gagne, G.: Operating System Concepts, 9th edn. Wiley, Hoboken (2012)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Zakharov, I.S., Mandrykin, M.U., Mutilin, V.S., Novikov, E.M., Petrenko, A.K., Khoroshilov, A.V.: Configurable toolset for static verification of operating systems kernel modules. Program. Comput. Soft. 41(1), 49–64 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Lal, A., Qadeer, S.: Powering the Static Driver Verifier using Corral. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE 2014, pp. 202–212. ACM, New York (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Beyer, D., Petrenko, A.K.: Linux driver verification. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds.) ISoLA 2012. LNCS, vol. 7610, pp. 1–6. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34032-1_1

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Ball, T., Levin, V., Rajamani, S.K.: A decade of software model checking with SLAM. Commun. ACM 54(7), 68–76 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Post, H., Sinz, C., Küchlin, W.: Towards automatic software model checking of thousands of Linux modules - a case study with Avinux. Softw. Test. Verif. Reliab. 19(2), 155–172 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Witkowski, T., Blanc, N., Kroening, D., Weissenbacher, G.: Model checking concurrent Linux device drivers. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2007, pp. 501–504. ACM, New York (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Novikov, E.: Evolution of the Linux kernel. Trudy ISP RAN/Proc. ISP RAS 29(2), 77–96 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Novikov, E.: Static verification of operating system monolithic kernels. Trudy ISP RAN/Proc. ISP RAS 29(2), 97–116 (2017)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  10. Black, P., Ribeiro, A.: SATE V Ockham sound analysis criteria. NIST Interagency/Internal Report 8113, 1–31 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Gu, R., et al.: Deep specifications and certified abstraction layers. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 2015, pp. 595–608. ACM, New York (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Klein, G., et al.: Comprehensive formal verification of an OS microkernel. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 32(1), 1–70 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Alkassar, E., Paul, W.J., Starostin, A., Tsyban, A.: Pervasive verification of an OS microkernel. In: Leavens, G.T., O’Hearn, P., Rajamani, S.K. (eds.) VSTTE 2010. LNCS, vol. 6217, pp. 71–85. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15057-9_5

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Efremov, D., Mandrykin, M.: Formal verification of Linux kernel library functions. Trudy ISP RAN/Proc. ISP RAS 29(6), 49–76 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Ferreira, J.F., Gherghina, C., He, G., Qin, S., Chin, W.N.: Automated verification of the FreeRTOS scheduler in HIP/SLEEK. Int. J. Softw. Tools Technol. Transf. 16(4), 381–397 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Gotsman, A., Yang, H.: Modular verification of preemptive OS kernels. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, ICFP 2011, pp. 404–417. ACM, New York (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Azevedo de Amorim, A., et al.: A verified information-flow architecture. In: Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 2014, pp. 165–178. ACM, New York (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Leino, K.R.M.: Developing verified programs with Dafny. In: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2013, pp. 1488–1490. IEEE Press, Piscataway (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  19. DeHon, A., et al.: Preliminary design of the SAFE platform. In: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems, PLOS 2011, pp. 1–5. ACM, New York (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Yang, J., Hawblitzel, C.: Safe to the last instruction: automated verification of a type-safe operating system. In: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2010, pp. 99–110. ACM, New York (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Jhala, R., Majumdar, R.: Software model checking. ACM Comput. Surv. 41(4), 1–54 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Beyer, D.: Software verification with validation of results. In: Legay, A., Margaria, T. (eds.) TACAS 2017. LNCS, vol. 10206, pp. 331–349. Springer, Heidelberg (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54580-5_20

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  23. Musuvathi, M., Engler, D.R.: Model checking large network protocol implementations. In: Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2004, pp. 12–12. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Galloway, A., Lüttgen, G., Mühlberg, J.T., Siminiceanu, R.I.: Model-checking the Linux virtual file system. In: Jones, N.D., Müller-Olm, M. (eds.) VMCAI 2009. LNCS, vol. 5403, pp. 74–88. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-93900-9_10

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. Yang, J., Twohey, P., Engler, D., Musuvathi, M.: Using model checking to find serious file system errors. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 24(4), 393–423 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Liakh, S., Grace, M., Jiang, X.: Analyzing and improving Linux kernel memory protection: a model checking approach. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2010, pp. 271–280. ACM, New York (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Khoroshilov, A., Mutilin, V., Novikov, E., Zakharov, I.: Modeling environment for static verification of Linux kernel modules. In: Voronkov, A., Virbitskaite, I. (eds.) PSI 2014. LNCS, vol. 8974, pp. 400–414. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46823-4_32

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  28. Novikov, E., Zakharov, I.: Towards automated static verification of GNU C programs. In: Petrenko, A.K., Voronkov, A. (eds.) PSI 2017. LNCS, vol. 10742, pp. 402–416. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74313-4_30

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  29. Beyer, D., Keremoglu, M.E.: CPAchecker: a tool for configurable software verification. In: Gopalakrishnan, G., Qadeer, S. (eds.) CAV 2011. LNCS, vol. 6806, pp. 184–190. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22110-1_16

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  30. Engler, D., Musuvathi, M.: Static analysis versus software model checking for bug finding. In: Steffen, B., Levi, G. (eds.) VMCAI 2004. LNCS, vol. 2937, pp. 191–210. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24622-0_17

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

    Evgeny Novikov & Ilja Zakharov

Authors
  1. Evgeny Novikov
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Ilja Zakharov
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evgeny Novikov .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Novikov, E., Zakharov, I. (2018). Verification of Operating System Monolithic Kernels Without Extensions. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice. ISoLA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11247. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_19

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_19

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03426-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03427-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation