Student Jobs

"Experimental Profiling of the Runtime Activity of Windows Device Drivers"

Unfortunately, in the last years the term "Blue Screen of Death" (BSoD) has become  popular due to the frequent operating system crashes. Currently, research showed that faulty device drivers represent a major cause of operating system failures leading to BSoD.

Problem. Device drivers are usually kernel add-on components written to support the communication with a peripheral device (digital camera, printer etc.) They have a very short time-to-market, so the time allotted for testing them is usually very short. This situation leads to insufficiently tested drivers being installed on millions of machines in the OS kernel, thus directly interacting with critical kernel structures.

What we do. In our group we are profiling the activity of device drivers at runtime, to indicate which locations have to be targeted by subsequent testing campaigns. Therefore, using our driver operational profiles, testing can be made more efficient, i.e., in the same allotted time more testing can be done to the code areas having high likelihood to be reached in the field. In other words, bugs likely to appear in a user's setup can be found earlier, before releasing the driver onto the market.

What you should do. We have already implemented a monitoring framework for Windows XP device drivers. You should port it to several other drivers. This work implies writing DLL libraries, using a given template. This activity requires a lot of copy-paste sequences ;) compiling and testing the newly created libraries. In some cases, debugging the C code might be necessary.

Requirements. The candidate for this HiWi job should have knowledge about operating systems, C programming and preferably about drivers but not mandatory.

Start: As soon as possible!

Contact:
Constantin Sarbu (Dinu)
Room: S2|02 E206
Tel. 06151-16-5359
email: