Re: [Qemu-devel] Idea: Qemu as test coverage tool for kernels

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 10:08:26PM -0800, Kyle Hayes wrote:
> On Saturday 28 January 2006 04:26, Blue Swirl wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Qemu's system emulators could be modified to output information about
> > the code areas which have been executed by the virtual CPU. The output
> > could then be used in standard test coverage tools. The benefit would be
> > the ability to get kernel-level coverage data.
> 
> You might want to look a valgrind.  The KDE project uses it heavily for 
> memory leak and other types of problem detection.  It is a sort of 
> intermediate step between an interpreter and Qemu.  I'm not sure where it 
> lives, but Google should find it.

  Another option might be SystemTap, by activating and counting all probes
and then generating coverage maps from the output, might be simpler to
actually set-up, though I have no idea of the resulting impedance of activating
all probes in a running kernel:
    http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
    http://www.redhat.com/magazine/011sep05/features/systemtap/

Daniel

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