Abstract:

Dependability evaluation is playing an increasing role in system and software engineering together with performance evaluation. Performance benchmarks are widely used to evaluate system performance while dependability benchmarks are hardly emerging. A dependability benchmark for operating systems is intended to objectively characterize the operating system's behavior in the presence of faults, through dependability and performance-related measures, obtained by means of controlled experiments. This paper presents a dependability benchmark for general-purpose operating systems and its application to three versions of Windows operating system and four versions of Linux operating system. The benchmark measures are: operating system robustness (as regards possible erroneous inputs provided by the application software to the operating system via the application programming interface), operating system reaction and restart times in the presence of faults. The workload is JVM (Java Virtual Machine), a software layer, on top of the operating system allowing applications in Java language to be platform independent.
Received on April 18, 2006
References: 16