Fault/failure analysis of the Tandem NonStop-UX operating system

Author

Iyer, Ravishankar K. ; Hsueh, Mei-Chen ; Lee, Inhwan

Author_Institution

Coordinated Sci. Lab., Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL, USA

fYear

1996

fDate

27-31 Oct 1996

Firstpage

491

Lastpage

497

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an analyse´s of failures in several releases of Tandem´s NonStop-UX operating system. NonStop-UX is based on UNIX System V. The analysis covers software failures from the field and failures reported by Tandem´s test center. Faults are classified based on the status of the reported failures, the locations of the code that detected the problems, the panic messages generated by the systems, the faulty source modules, and the types of developer´s mistakes. We present distributions of the failure and repair times for unique and duplicate failures. We also discuss how the analysis results can be used for assessing the dependability of the operating system and guiding improvement efforts

Keywords

Unix; failure analysis; software maintenance; software reliability; Tandem NonStop-UX operating system; UNIX System V; dependability; duplicate failure; fault/failure analysis; faulty source modules; panic messages; repair times; reported failures; software failures; unique failures; Computer crashes; Data structures; Failure analysis; Fault detection; Hardware; Information analysis; Kernel; Operating systems; Software testing; System testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Digital Avionics Systems Conference, 1996., 15th AIAA/IEEE

Conference_Location

Atlanta, GA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3385-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/DASC.1996.559205

Filename

559205