Customizing Virtual Machine with Fault Injector by Integrating with SpecC Device Model for a Software Testing Environment D-Cloud

Abstract

D-Cloud is a software testing environment for dependable parallel and distributed systems using cloud computing technology. We use Eucalyptus as cloud management software to manage virtual machines designed based on QEMU, called FaultVM, which have a fault injection mechanism. D-Cloud enables the test procedures to be automated using a large amount of computing resources in the cloud by interpreting the system configuration and the test scenario written in XML in D-Cloud front end and enables tests including hardware faults by emulating hardware faults by FaultVM flexibly. In the present paper, we describe the customization facility of FaultVM used to add new device models. We use SpecC, which is a system description language, to describe the behavior of devices, and a simulator generated from the description by SpecC is linked and integrated into FaultVM. This also makes the definition and injection of faults flexible without the modification of the original QEMU source codes. This facility allows D-Cloud to be used to test distributed systems with customized devices.