Subversion Repositories HelenOS-doc

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\title{A Road to a Formally Verified General-Purpose Operating System}

\author{Martin D\v{e}ck\'{y}}

\institute{Department of Distributed and Dependable Systems\\

        Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University\\

        Malostransk\'{e} n\'{a}m\v{e}st\'{i} 25, Prague 1, 118~00, Czech Republic\\

        \email{martin.decky@d3s.mff.cuni.cz}}

\begin{document}

    \maketitle

    \begin{abstract}

        Methods of formal description and verification represent a viable way for achieving

        fundamentally bug-free software. However, in reality only a small subset of the existing operating

        systems were ever formally verified, despite the fact that an operating system is a critical part

        of almost any other software system. This paper points out several key design choices which

        should make the formal verification of an operating system easier and presents a work-in-progress

        and initial experiences with formal verification of HelenOS, a state-of-the-art microkernel-based

        operating system, which, however, was not designed specifically with formal verification in mind,

        as this is mostly prohibitive due to time and budget constrains.

        The contribution of this paper is the shift of focus from attempts to use a single ``silver-bullet''

        formal verification method which would be able to verify everything to a combination of multiple

        formalisms and techniques to successfully cover various aspects of the operating system.

        A reliable and dependable operating system is the emerging property of the combination,

        thanks to the suitable architecture of the operating system.

    \end{abstract}

    \section{Introduction}

        \label{introduction}

        Operating systems (OSes for short) have a somewhat special position among all software.

        OSes are usually designed to run on bare hardware. This means that they do not require

        any special assumptions on the environment except the assumptions on the properties and

        behavior of hardware. In many cases it is perfectly valid to consider the hardware

        as \emph{idealized hardware} (zero mathematical probability of failure, perfect compiance

        with the specifications, etc.). This means that it is solely the OS that defines the

        environment for other software.

        OSes represent the lowest software layer and provide services to essentially all other

        software. Considering the principle of recursion, the properties of an OS form the

        assumptions for the upper layers of software. Thus the dependability of end-user and

        enterprise software systems is always limited by the dependability of the OS.

        Finally, OSes are non-trivial software on their own. The way they are generally designed

        and programmed (spanning both the kernel and user mode, manipulating execution contexts

        and concurrency, handling critical hardware-related operations) represent significant

        and interesting challenges for software analysis.

        \medskip

        These are probably the most important reasons that led to several research initiatives

        in the recent years which target the creation of a formally verified OSes from scratch

        (e.g. \cite{seL4}). Methods of formal description and verification provide fundamentally

        better guarantees of desirable properties than non-exhaustive engineering methods such

        as testing.

        However, 98~\%\footnote{98~\% of client computers connected to the Internet as of January

        2010~\cite{marketshare}.} of the market share of general-purpose OSes is taken

        by Windows, Mac~OS~X and Linux. These systems were clearly not designed with formal

        verification in mind from the very beginning. The situation on the embedded, real-time

        and special-purpose OSes market is probably different, but it is unlikely that the

        segmentation of the desktop and server OSes market is going to change very rapidly

        in the near future.

        The architecture of these major desktop and server OSes is monolithic, which makes

        any attempts to do formal verification on them extremely challenging due to the large

        state space. Fortunatelly we can observe that aspects of several novel approaches from

        the OS research from the late 1980s and early 1990s (microkernel design, user space

        file system and device drivers, etc.) are slowly emerging in these originally purely

        monolithic implementations.

        \medskip

        In this paper we show how specific design choices can markedly improve the feasibility

        of verification of an OS, even if the particular OS was not designed

        specifically with formal verification in mind. These design choices can be gradually

        introduced (and in fact some of them have already been introduced) to mainstream

        general-purpose OSes.

        Our approach is not based on using a single ``silver-bullet'' formalism, methodology or

        tool, but on combining various enginering, semi-formal and formal approaches.

        While the lesser formal approaches give lesser guarantees, they can complement

        the formal approaches on their boundaries and increase the coverage of the set of

        all hypothetical interesting properties of the system.

        We also demonstrate work-in-progress case study of an general-purpose research OS

        that was not created specifically with formal verification in mind from the very

        beginning, but that was designed according to state-of-the-art OS principles.

        \medskip

        \noindent\textbf{Structure of the Paper.} In Section \ref{design} we introduce

        the design choices and our case study in more detail. In Section \ref{analysis} we

        discuss our approach of the combination of methods and tools. In Section \ref{evaluation}

        we present a preliminary evaluation of our efforts and propose the imminent next steps

        to take. Finally, in Section \ref{conclusion} we present the conclusion of the paper.

    \section{Operating Systems Design}

        \label{design}

        Two very common schemes of OS design are \emph{monolithic design} and \emph{microkernel design}.

        Without going into much detail of any specific implementation, we can define the monolithic design as

        a preference to put numerous aspects of the core OS functionality into the kernel, while microkernel

        design is a preference to keep the kernel small, with just a minimal set of features.

        The features which are missing from the kernel in the microkernel design are implemented

        in user space, usually by means of libraries, servers (e.g. processes/tasks) and/or software components.

        \subsection{HelenOS}

            \label{helenos}

            \emph{HelenOS} is a general-purpose research OS which is being developed at Charles

            University in Prague. The source code is available under the BSD open source license and can be

            freely downloaded from the project web site~\cite{helenos}. The authors of the code base are

            both from the academia and from the open source community (several contributors are employed

            as Solaris kernel developers and many are freelance IT professionals).

            HelenOS uses a preemptive priority-feedback scheduler, it supports SMP hardware and it is

            designed to be highly portable. Currently it runs on 7 distinct hardware architectures, including the

            most common IA-32, x86-64 (AMD64), IA-64, SPARC~v9 and PowerPC. It also runs on ARMv7 and MIPS,

            but currently only in simulators and not on physical hardware.

            Although HelenOS is still far from being an everyday replacement for Linux or Windows due to the lack

            of end-user applications (whose development is extremely time-consuming, but unfortunately of

            no scientific value), the essential foundations such as file system support and TCP/IP networking

            are already in place.

            HelenOS does not currently target embedded devices (although the ARMv7 port can be very easily

            modified to run on various embedded boards) and does not implement real-time features.

            Many development projects such as task snapshoting and migration, support for MMU-less

            platforms and performance monitoring are currently underway.

            \medskip

            HelenOS can be briefly described as microkernel multiserver design. However, the actual design

            guiding principles of the HelenOS are more elaborate:

            \begin{description}

                \item[Microkernel principle] Every functionality of the OS that does not

                      have to be necessary implemented in the kernel should be implemented in user space. This

                      implies that subsystems such as the file system, device drivers (except those which are

                      essential for the basic kernel functionality), naming and trading services, networking,

                      human interface and similar features should be implemented in user space.

                \item[Full-fledged principle] Features which need to be placed in kernel should

                      be implemented by full-fledged algorithms and data structures. In contrast

                      to several other microkernel OSes, where the authors have deliberately chosen

                      the most simplistic approach (static memory allocation, na\"{\i}ve algorithms, simple data

                      structures), HelenOS microkernel tries to use the most advanced and suitable means available.

                      It contains features such as AVL and B+ trees, hashing tables, SLAB memory allocator, multiple

                      in-kernel synchronization primitives, fine-grained locking and so on.

                \item[Multiserver principle] Subsystems in user space should be decomposed with the smallest

                      reasonable granularity. Each unit of decomposition should be encapsulated in a separate task.

                      The tasks represent software components with isolated address spaces. From the design point of

                      view the kernel can be seen as a separate component, too.

                \item[Split of mechanism and policy] The kernel should only provide low-level mechanisms,

                      while the high-level policies which are built upon these mechanisms should be defined in

                      user space. This also implies that the policies should be easily replaceable while keeping

                      the low-level mechanisms intact.

                \item[Encapsulation principle] The communication between the tasks/components should be

                      implemented only via a set of well-defined interfaces. In the user-to-user case the preferred

                      communication mechanism is HelenOS IPC, which provides reasonable mix of abstraction and

                      performance (RPC-like primitives combined with implicit memory sharing for large data

                      transfers). In case of synchronous user-to-kernel communication the usual syscalls are used.

                      HelenOS IPC is used again for asynchronous kernel-to-user communication.

                \item[Portability principle] The design and implementation should always maintain a high

                      level of platform neutrality and portability. Platform-specific code in the kernel, core

                      libraries and tasks implementing device drivers should be clearly separated from the

                      generic code (either by component decomposition or at least by internal compile-time APIs).

            \end{description}

            In Section \ref{analysis} we argue that several of these design principles significantly improve

            the feasibility of formal verification of the entire system. On the other hand, other design principles

            induce new interesting challenges for formal description and verification.

            The run-time architecture of HelenOS is inherently dynamic. The bindings between the components are

            not created at compile-time, but during bootstrap and can be modified to a large degree also during

            normal operation mode of the system (via human interaction and external events).

            The design of the ubiquitous HelenOS IPC mechanism and the associated threading model present

            the possibility to significantly reduce the size of the state space which needs to be explored

            by formal verification tools, but at the same time it is quite hard to express these

            constrains in many formalisms. The IPC is inherently asynchronous with constant message buffers

            in the kernel and dynamic buffers in user space. It uses the notions of uni-directional bindings,

            mandatory pairing of requests and replies, binding establishment and abolishment handshakes,

            memory sharing and fast message forwarding.

            For easier management of the asynchronous messages and the possibility to process multiple

            messages from different peers without the usual kernel threading overhead, the core user space

            library manages the execution flow by so-called \emph{fibrils}. A fibril is a user-space-managed

            thread with cooperative scheduling. A different fibril is scheduled every time the current fibril

            is about to be blocked while sending out IPC requests (because the kernel buffers of the addressee

            are full) or while waiting on an IPC reply. This allows different execution flows within the

            same thread to process multiple requests and replies. To safeguard proper sequencing of IPC

            messages and provide synchronization, special fibril-aware synchronization primitives

            (mutexes, condition variables, etc.) are available.

            Because of the cooperative nature of fibrils, they might cause severe performance under-utilization

            in SMP configurations and system-wide bottlenecks. As multicore processors are more and more

            common nowadays, that would be a substantial design flaw. Therefore the fibrils can be also freely

            (and to some degree even automatically) combined with the usual kernel threads, which provide

            preemptive scheduling and true parallelism on SMP machines. Needless to say, this combination is

            also a grand challenge for the formal reasoning.

            \medskip

            Incidentally, the \emph{full-fledged principle} causes that the size of the HelenOS microkernel is

            considerably larger compared to other ``scrupulous'' microkernel implementations. The average

            footprint of the kernel on IA-32 ranges from 569~KiB when all logging messages, asserts, symbol

            resolution and the debugging kernel console are compiled in, down to 198~KiB for a non-debugging

            production build. But we do not believe that the raw size of the microkernel is a relevant quality

            criterion per se, without taking the actual feature set into account.

            \medskip

            To sum up, the choice of HelenOS as our case study is based on the fact that it was not designed

            in advance with formal verification in mind (some of the design principles might be beneficial,

            but others might be disadvantageous), but the design of HelenOS is also non-trivial and not obsolete.

        \subsection{The C Programming Language}

            A large majority of OSes is coded in the C programming language (HelenOS is no exception

            to this). The choice of C in the case of kernel is usually well-motivated, since the C language was designed

            specifically for implementing system software~\cite{c}: It is reasonably low-level in the sense that it allows

            to access the memory and other hardware resources with similar effectiveness as from assembler;

            It also requires almost no run-time support and it exports many features of the von Neumann hardware

            architecture to the programmer in a very straightforward, but still relatively portable way.

            However, what is the biggest advantage of C in terms of run-time performance is also the biggest weakness

            for formal reasoning. The permissive memory access model of C, the lack of any reference safety

            enforcement, the weak type system and generally little semantic information in the code -- all these

            properties that do not allow to make many general assumptions about the code.

            Programming languages which target controlled environments such as Java or C\(\sharp\) are

            generally easier for formal reasoning because they provide a well-known set of primitives

            and language constructs for object ownership, threading and synchronization. Many non-imperative

            programming languages can be even considered to be a form of ``executable specification'' and thus

            very suitable for formal reasoning. In C, almost everything is left to the programmer who

            is free to set the rules.

            \medskip

            The reasons for frequent use of C in the user space of many established OSes (and HelenOS) is

            probably much more questionable. In the case of HelenOS, except for the core libraries and tasks

            (such as device drivers), C might be easily replaced by any high-level and perhaps even

            non-imperative programming language. The reasons for using C in this context are mostly historical.

            However, as we have stated in Section \ref{introduction}, the way general-purpose OSes

            are implemented changes only slowly and therefore any propositions which require radical modification

            of the existing code base before committing to the formal verification are not realistic.

    \section{Analysis}

        \label{analysis}

        \begin{figure}[t]

            \begin{center}

                \resizebox*{125mm}{!}{\includegraphics{diag}}

                \caption{Overview of the formalisms and tools proposed.}

                \label{fig:diag}

            \end{center}

        \end{figure}

        In this section, we analyze the properties we would like to check in a general-purpose

        operating system. Each set of properties usually requires a specific verification method,

        tool or toolchain.

        Our approach will be mostly bottom-up, or, in other words, from the lower levels of abstraction

        to the higher levels of abstraction. If the verification fails on a lower level, it usually

        does not make much sense to continue with the higher levels of abstraction until the issues

        are tackled. A structured overview of the formalisms, methods and tools can be seen on

        Figure \ref{fig:diag}.

        \medskip

        Some of the proposed methods cannot be called ``formal methods'' in the rigorous understanding

        of the term. However, even methods which are based on semi-formal reasoning and non-exhaustive

        testing provide some limited guarantees in their specific context. A valued property

        of the formal methods is to preserve these limited guarantees even on the higher levels

        of abstraction, thus complementing the formal guarantees where the formal methods do not provide

        any feasible verification so far. This increases the coverage of the set of all hypothetical

        interesting properties of the system (although it is probably impossible to formally define

        this set).

        \medskip

        Please note that the titles of the following sections do not follow any particular established

        taxonomy. We have simply chosen the names to be intuitivelly descriptive.

        \subsection{C Language Compiler and Continuous Integration Tool}

            \label{clang}

            The initial levels of abstraction do not go far from the C source code and common engineering

            approaches. First, we would certainly like to know whether our code base is compliant with the

            programming language specification and passes only the basic semantic checks (proper number

            and types of arguments passed to functions, etc.). It is perhaps not very surprising that

            these decisions can be made by any plain C compiler. However, with the current implementation

            of HelenOS even this is not quite trivial.

            Besides the requirement to support 7 hardware platforms, the system's compile-time configuration

            can be also affected by approximately 65 configuration options, most of which are booleans,

            the rest are enumerated types.

            These configuration options are bound by logical propositions in conjunctive or disjunctive

            normal forms and while some options are freely configurable, the value of others gets inferred

            by the build system of HelenOS. The overall number of distinct configurations in which

            HelenOS can be compiled is at least one order of magnitude larger than the plain number

            of supported hardware platforms.

            Various configuration options affect conditional compilation and linking. The programmers

            are used to make sure that the source code compiles and links fine with respect to the

            most common and obvious configurations, but the unforeseen interaction of the less common

            configuration options might cause linking or even compilation errors.

            \medskip

            A straightforward solution is to generate all distinct configurations, starting from the

            open variables and inferring the others. This can be part of the continuous integration

            process which would try to compile and link the sources in all distinct configurations.

            If we want to be really pedantic, we should also make sure that we run all higher

            level verification methods on all configurations generated by this step. That would certainly

            require to multiply the time required by the verification methods at least by the number

            of the distinct configurations. Constraining the set of configurations to just the most

            representative ones is perhaps a reasonable compromise to make the verification realistic.

        \subsection{Regression and Unit Tests}

            Running regression and unit tests which are part of HelenOS code base in the continuous

            integration process is fairly easy. The only complication lies in the technicalities:

            We need to setup an automated network of physical machines and simulators which can run the

            appropriate compilation outputs for the specific platforms. We need to be able to reboot

            them remotely and distribute the boot images to them. And last but not least, we need to be

            able to gather the results from them.

            Testing is always non-exhaustive, thus the guarantees provided by tests are strictly limited

            to the use cases and contexts which are being explicitly tested. However, it is arguably

            easier to express many common use cases in the primary programming language than in some

            different formalism. As we follow the bottom-up approach, filtering out the most obvious

            bugs by testing can save us a lot of valuable time which would be otherwise waisted by

            a futile verification by more formal (and more time-consuming) methods.

        \subsection{Instrumentation}

            Instrumentation tools for detecting memory leaks, performance bottlenecks and soft-deadlocks

            are also not usually considered to be formal verification tools (since it is hard to define

            exact formal properties which are being verified by the non-exhaustive nature of these tools).

            They are also rarely utilized on regular basis as part of the continuous integration process.

            But again, it might be helpful to just mention them in the big picture.

            If some regression or unit tests fail, they sometimes do not give sufficient information to

            tell immediately what is the root cause of the issue. In that case running the faulting tests

            on manually or automatically instrumented executable code might provide more data and point

            more directly to the actual bug.

        \subsection{Verifying C Language Compiler}

            C language compilers are traditionally also not considered to be formal verification tools.

            Many people just say that C compilers are good at generating executable code, but do not

            care much about the semantics of the source code (on the other hand, formal verification

            tools usually do not generate any executable code at all). However, with recent development

            in the compiler domain, the old paradigms are shifting.

            As the optimization passes and general maturity of the compilers improve over time,

            the compilers try to extract and use more and more semantic information from the source code.

            The C language is quite poor on explicit semantic information, but the verifying compilers

            try to rely on vendor-specific language extensions and on the fact that some semantic information

            can be added to the source code without changing the resulting executable code.

            The checks done by the verifying compilers cannot result in fatal errors in the usual cases (they

            are just warnings). Firstly, the compilers still need to successfully compile a well-formed C source

            code compliant to some older standard (e.g. C89) even when it is not up with the current quality

            expectations. Old legacy source code should still pass the compilation as it did decades ago.

            Secondly, the checks run by the verifying compilers are usually not based on abstract interpretation.

            They are mostly realized as abstract syntax tree transformations much in the line with the supporting

            routines of the compilation process (data and control flow graph analysis, dead code elimination,

            register allocation, etc.) and the evaluation function is basically the matching of antipatterns

            of common programming bugs.

            The checks are usually conservative. The verifying compilers identify code constructs which are suspicious,

            which might arise out of programmer's bad intuition and so on, but even these code snippets cannot be

            tagged as definitive bugs (since the programmer can be simply in a position where he/she really wants to

            do something very strange, but nevertheless legitimate). It is upon the programmer

            to examine the root cause of the compiler warning, tell whether it is really a bug or just a false

            positive and fix the issue by either amending some additional semantic information (e.g. adding an

            explicit typecast or a vendor-specific language extension) or rewriting the code.

            Although this level of abstraction is coarse-grained and conservative, it can be called semi-formal,

            since the properties which are being verified can be actually defined quite exactly and they

            are reasonably general. They do not deal with single traces of methods, runs and use

            cases like tests, but they deal with all possible contexts in which the code can run.

        \subsection{Static Analyzer}

            Static analyzers try to go deeper than verifying compilers. Besides detecting common antipatterns of

            bugs, they also use techniques such as abstract interpretation to check for more complex properties.

            Most commercial static analyzers come with a predefined set of properties which cannot be easily changed.

            They are coupled with the commonly used semantics of the environment and generate domain-specific models

            of the software based not only on the syntax of the source code, but also based on the assumptions derived

            from the memory access model, allocation and deallocation rules, tracking of references and tracking of

            concurrency locks.

            The biggest advantage of static analyzers is that they can be easily included in the development or

            continuous integration process as an additional automated step, very similar to the verifying compilers.

            No manual definition of code-specific properties is needed and false positives can be relatively easily

            eliminated by amending some explicit additional information to the source code within the boundaries

            of the programming language.

            The authors of static analyzers claim large quantities of bugs detected or prevented~\cite{billion},

            but static analyzers are still relatively limited by the kind of bugs they are designed to detect.

            They are usually good at pointing out common issues with security implications (specific types of

            buffer and stack overruns, usage of well-known functions in an unsafe way, clear cases of forgotten

            deallocation of resources and release of locks, etc.). Unfortunately, many static analyzers

            only analyze a single-threaded control flow and are thus unable to detect concurrency issues

            such as deadlocks.

        \subsection{Static Verifier}

            There is one key difference between a static analyzer and a static verifier: Static verifiers

            allow the user to specify one's own properties, in terms of preconditions, postconditions and

            invariants in the code. Many static verifiers also target true multithreaded usage patterns

            and have the capability to check proper locking order, hand-over-hand locking and even liveliness.

            In the context of an operating system kernel and core libraries two kinds of properties are

            common:

            \begin{description}

                \item[Consistency constrains] These properties define the correct way how data is supposed

                      to be manipulated by some related set of subroutines. Checking for these

                      properties ensures that data structures and internal states will not get corrupt due

                      to bugs in the functions and methods which are designed to manipulate them.

                \item[Interface enforcements] These properties define the correct semantics by which

                      a set of subroutines should be used by the rest of the code. Checking for these properties

                      ensures that some API is always used by the rest of the code in a specified way

                      and all reported exceptions are handled by the client code.

            \end{description}

        \subsection{Model Checker}

            \label{modelcheck}

            On the first sight it does not seem to be reasonable to consider general model checkers as

            relevant independent tools for formal verification of an existing operating system. While many

            different tools use model checkers as their backends, verifying a complete model of the entire

            system created by hand seems to be infeasible both in the sense of time required for the model

            creation and resources required by the checker to finish the exhaustive traversal of the model's

            address space.

            Nevertheless, model checkers on their own can still serve a good job verifying abstract

            properties of key algorithms without dealing with the technical details of the implementation.

            Various properties of synchronization algorithms, data structures and communication protocols

            can be verified in the most generic conditions by model checkers, answering the

            question whether they are designed properly in theory.

            If the implementation of these algorithms and protocols do not behave correctly, we can be sure

            that the root cause is in the non-compliance between the design and implementation and not a

            fundamental flaw of the design itself.

        \subsection{Architecture and Behavior Checker}

            All previously mentioned verification methods were targeting internal properties of the OS

            components. If we are moving to a higher-level abstraction in order to specify correct

            interaction of the encapsulated components in terms of interface compatibility and communication,

            we can utilize \emph{Behavior Protocols}~\cite{bp} or some other formalism describing correct

            interaction between software components.

            To gain the knowledge about the architecture of the whole OS in terms of software

            component composition and bindings, we can use \emph{Architecture Description Language}~\cite{adl}

            as the specification of the architecture of the system. This language has the possibility to capture

            interface types (with method signatures), primitive components (in terms of provided and required

            interfaces), composite components (an architectural compositions of primitive components) and the

            bindings between the respective interfaces of the components.

            It is extremely important to define the right role of the behavior and architecture description.

            A flawed approach would be to reverse-engineer this description from the source code (either manually

            or via some sophisticated tool) and then verify the compliance between the desciption and

            the implementation. However, different directions can give more interesting results:

            \begin{description}

                \item[Description as specification] Behavior and architecture description created independently

                      on the source code serves the role of specification. This has the following primary

                      goals of formal verification:

                      \begin{description}

                        \item[Horizontal compliance] Also called \emph{compatibility}. The goal is to check

                             whether the specifications of components that are bound together are semantically

                             compatible. All required interfaces need to be bound to provided interfaces and

                             the communication between the components cannot lead to \emph{no activity} (a deadlock),

                             \emph{bad activity} (a livelock) or other communication and synchronization errors.

                        \item[Vertical compliance] Also called \emph{substituability}. The goal is to check whether

                             it is possible to replace a set of primitive components that are nested inside a composite

                             component by the composite component itself. In other words, this compliance can answer the

                             questions whether the architecture description of the system is sound with respect to the hierarchical

                             composition of the components.

                        \item[Compliance between the specification and the implementation] Using various means

                             for generating artificial environments for an isolated component the checker is able to

                             partially answer the question whether the implementation of the component is an instantiation

                             of the component specification.

                      \end{description}

                \item[Description as abstraction] Generating the behavior and architecture description from the

                      source code by means of abstract interpretation can serve the purpose of verifying various

                      properties of the implementation such as invariants, preconditions and postconditions.

                      This is similar to static verification, but on the level of component interfaces.

            \end{description}

            Unfortunately, most of the behavior and architecture formalisms are static, which is not quite suitable

            for the dynamic of most OSes. This limitation can be circumvented by considering a relevant

            snapshot of the dynamic run-time architecture. This snapshot fixed in time is equivalent to

            a statically defined architecture.

            \medskip

            The key features of software systems with respect to behavior and architecture checkers are the granularity

            of the individual primitive components, the level of isolation and complexity of the communication mechanism

            between them. Large monolithic OSes created in sematic-poor C present a severe challenge because the

            isolation of the individual components is vague and the communication between them is basically unlimited

            (function calls, shared resources, etc.).

            OSes with explicit component architecture and fine-grained components (such as microkernel multiserver

            systems) make the feasibility of the verification much easier, since the degrees of freedom (and thus

            the state space) is limited.

            Horizontal and vertical compliance checking can be done exhaustively. This is a fundamental property

            which allows the reasoning about the dependability of the entire component-based OS.

            Assuming that the lower-level verification methods (described in Sections \ref{clang} to \ref{modelcheck})

            prove some specific properties of the primitive components, we can be sure that the composition of

            the primitive components into composite components and ultimately into the whole OS

            does not break these properties.

            The feasibility of many lower-level verification methods from Sections \ref{clang} to \ref{modelcheck}

            depends largely on the size and complexity of the code under verification. If the entire OS

            is decomposed into primitive components with a fine granularity, it is more likely that the

            individual primitive components can be verified against a large number of properties. Thanks to the

            recursive component composition we can then be sure that these properties also hold for the entire system.

            \medskip

            The compliance between the behavior specification and the actual behavior of the implementation is, unfortunately,

            the missing link in the chain. This compliance cannot be easily verified in an exhaustive manner. If there is

            a discrepancy between the specified and the actual behavior of the components, we cannot conclude anything about

            the properties holding in the entire system.

            However, there is one way how to improve the situation: \emph{code generation}. If we generate implementation

            from the specification, the compliance between them is axiomatic. If we are able to generate enough

            code from the specification to run into the hand-written ``business code'' where we check for

            the lower-level properties, the conclusions about the component composition are going to hold.

        \subsection{Behavior Description Generator}

            To conclude our path towards higher abstractions we can utilize tools that can

            generate the behavior descriptions from \emph{textual use cases} written in a domain-constrained English.

            These generated artifacts can be then compared (e.g. via vertical compliance checking) with the formal

            specification. Although the comparison might not provide clean-cut results, it can still be

            helpful to confront the more-or-less informal user expectations on the system with the exact formal description.

        \subsection{Summary}

            \label{missing}

            So far, we have proposed a compact combination of engineering, semi-formal and formal methods which

            start at the level of C programming language, offer the possibility to check for the presence of various

            common antipatterns, check for generic algorithm-related properties, consistency constrains, interface

            enforcements and conclude with a framework to make these properties hold even in the case of a large

            OS composed from many components of compliant behavior.

            We do not claim that there are no missing pieces in the big picture or that the semi-formal verifications

            might provide more guarantees in this setup. However, state-of-the-art OS design guidelines can push

            further the boundaries of practical feasibility of the presented methods. The limited guarantees

            of the low-level methods hold even in the composition and the high-level formal methods do not have

            to deal with unlimited degrees of freedom of the primitive component implementation.

            \medskip

            We have spoken only about the functional properties. In general, we cannot apply the same formalisms

            and methods on extra-functional properties (e.g. timing properties, performance properties, etc.).

            And although it probably does make a good sense to reason about component composition for the extra-functional

            properties, the exact relation might be different compared to the functional properties.

            The extra-functional properties need to be tackled by our future work.

    \section{Evaluation}

        \label{evaluation}

        This section copies the structure of the previous Section \ref{analysis} and adds HelenOS-specific

        evaluation of the the proposed formalisms and tools. As this is still largely a work-in-progress,

        in many cases just the initial observations can be made.

        The choice of the specific methods, tools and formalisms in this initial phase is mostly motivated

        by their perceived commonality and author's claims about fitness for the given purpose. An important

        part of further evaluation would certainly be to compare multiple particular approaches, tools

        and formalisms to find the optimal combination.

        \subsection{Verifying C Language Compiler and Continuous Integration Tool}

            The primary C compiler used by HelenOS is \emph{GNU GCC 4.4.3} (all platforms)~\cite{gcc} and \emph{Clang 2.6.0}

            (IA-32)~\cite{clang}. We have taken some effort to support also \emph{ICC} and \emph{Sun Studio} C compilers,

            but the compatibility with these compilers in not guaranteed.

            The whole code base is compiled with the \texttt{-Wall} and \texttt{-Wextra} compilation options. These options turn on

            most of the verification checks of the compilers. The compilers trip on common bug antipatterns such

            as implicit typecasting of pointer types, comparison of signed and unsigned integer values (danger

            of unchecked overflows), the usage of uninitialized variables, the presence of unused local variables,

            NULL-pointer dereferencing (determined by conservative local control flow analysis), functions

            with non-void return typed that do not return any value and so on. We treat all compilation warnings

            as fatal errors, thus the code base must pass without any warnings.

            We also turn on several more specific and strict checks. These checks helped to discover several

            latent bugs in the source code:

            \begin{description}

                \item[\texttt{-Wfloat-equal}] Check for exact equality comparison between floating point values. The

                      usage of equal comparator on floats is usually misguided due to the inherent computational errors

                      of floats.

                \item[\texttt{-Wcast-align}] Check for code which casts pointers to a type with a stricter alignment

                      requirement. On many RISC-based platforms this can cause run-time unaligned access exceptions.

                \item[\texttt{-Wconversion}] Check for code where the implicit type conversion (e.g. from float to integer,

                      between signed and unsigned integers or between integers with different number of bits) can

                      cause the actual value to change.

            \end{description}

            To enhance the semantic information in the source code, we use GCC-specific language extensions to annotate

            some particular kernel and core library routines:

            \begin{description}

                \item[\texttt{\_\_attribute\_\_((noreturn))}] Functions marked in this way never finish from the point of view

                      of the current sequential execution flow. The most common case are the routines which restore previously saved

                      execution context.

                \item[\texttt{\_\_attribute\_\_((returns\_twice))}] Functions marked in this way may return multiple times from

                      the point of view of the current sequential execution flow. This is the case of routines which save the current

                      execution context (first the function returns as usual, but the function can eventually ``return again''

                      when the context is being restored).

            \end{description}

            The use of these extensions has pointed out to several hard-to-debug bugs on the IA-64 platform.

            \medskip

            The automated continuous integration building system is currently work-in-progress. Thus, we do not

            test all possible configurations of HelenOS with each changeset yet. Currently only

            a representative set of 14 configurations (at least one for each supported platform) is tested by hand

            by the developers before committing any non-trivial changeset.

            From occasional tests of other configurations by hand and the frequency of compilation, linkage and

            even run-time problems we conclude that the automated testing of all feasible configurations will

            be very beneficial.

        \subsection{Regression and Unit Tests}

            As already stated in the previous section, the continuous integration building system has not been finished

            yet. Therefore regression and unit tests are executed occasionally by hand, which is time consuming

            and prone to human omissions. An automated approach is definitively going to be very helpful.

        \subsection{Instrumentation}

            We are in the process of implementing our own code instrumentation framework which is motivated mainly

            by the need to support MMU-less architectures in the future. But this framework might be also very helpful

            in detecting memory and generic resource leaks. We have not tried \emph{Valgrind}~\cite{valgrind} or any similar

            existing tool because of the estimated complexity to adopt it for the usage in HelenOS.

            HelenOS was also scanned by \emph{Coverity}~\cite{coverity} in 2006 when no errors were detected. However, since

            that time the code base has not been analyzed by Coverity.

        \subsection{Static Analyzer}

            The integration of various static analyzers into the HelenOS continuous integration process is underway.

            For the initial evaluation we have used \emph{Stanse}~\cite{stanse} and \emph{Clang Analyzer}~\cite{clanganalyzer}.

            Both of them showed to be moderately helpful to point out instances of unreachable dead code, use of language

            constructs which have ambiguous semantics in C and one case of possible NULL-pointer dereference.

            The open framework of Clang seems to be very promising for implementing domain-specific checks (and at

            the same time it is also a very promising compiler framework). Our mid-term goal is to incorporate some of the features

            of Stanse and VCC (see Section \ref{staticverifier2}) into Clang Analyzer.

        \subsection{Static Verifier}

            \label{staticverifier2}

            We have started to extend the source code of HelenOS kernel with annotations understood

            by \emph{Frama-C}~\cite{framac} and \emph{VCC}~\cite{vcc}. Initially we have targeted simple kernel data structures

            (doubly-linked circular lists) and basic locking operations. Currently we are evaluating the initial experiences

            and we are trying to identify the most suitable methodology, but we expect quite promising results.

            As the VCC is based on the Microsoft C++ Compiler, which does not support many GCC extensions, we have been

            faced with the requirement to preprocess the source code to be syntactically accepted by VCC. This turned out

            to be feasible.

        \subsection{Model Checker}

            We are in the process of creating models of kernel wait queues (basic HelenOS kernel synchronization

            primitive) and futexes (basic user space thread synchronization primitive) using \emph{Promela} and

            verify several formal properties (deadlock freedom, fairness) in \emph{Spin}~\cite{spin}. As both the Promela language

            and the Spin model checker are mature and commonly used tools for such purposes, we expect no major problems

            with this approach. Because both synchronization primitives are relatively complex, utilizing a model checker

            should provide a much more trustworthy proof of the required properties than ``paper and pencil''.

            The initial choice of Spin is motivated by its suitability to model threads, their interaction and verify

            properties related to race conditions and deadlocks (which is the common sources of OS-related bugs). Other

            modeling formalisms might be more suitable for different goals.

        \subsection{Architecture and Behavior Checker}

            We have created an architecture description in ADL language derived from \emph{SOFA ADL}~\cite{adl} for the

            majority of the HelenOS components and created the Behavior Protocol specification of these components.

            Both descriptions were created independently, not by reverse-engineering the existing source code.

            The architecture is a snapshot of the dynamic architecture just after a successful bootstrap of HelenOS.

            Both the architecture and behavior description is readily available as part of the source code repository

            of HelenOS, including tools which can preprocess the Behavior Protocols according to the architecture description

            and create an output suitable for \emph{bp2promela} checker~\cite{bp}.

            As the resulting complexity of the description is larger than any of the previously published case studies

            on Behavior Protocols (compare to~\cite{cocome}), our current work-in-progress is to optimize and fine-tune

            the bp2promela checker to process the input.

            \medskip

            We have not started to generate code from the architecture description so far because of time constrains.

            However, we believe that this is a very promising way to go and provide reasonable guarantees about

            the compliance between the specification and the implementation.

        \subsection{Behavior Description Generator}

            We have not tackled the issue of behavior description generation yet, although tools such as

            \emph{Procasor}~\cite{procasor} are readily available. We do not consider it our priority at this time.

    \section{Conclusion}

        \label{conclusion}

        In this paper we propose a complex combination of various verification methods and tools

        to achieve the verification of an entire general-purpose operating system. The proposed

        approach generally follows a bottom-up route, starting with low-level checks using state-of-the-art

        verifying C language compilers, following by static analyzers and static verifiers.

        In specific contexts regression and unit tests, code instrumentation and model checkers

        for the sake of verification of key algorithms are utilized.

        Thanks to the properties of state-of-the-art microkernel multiserver operating

        system design (e.g. software component encapsulation and composition, fine-grained isolated

        components), we demonstrate that it should be feasible to successfully verify larger and more

        complex operating systems than in the case of monolithic designs. We use formal component

        architecture and behavior description for the closure. The final goal -- a formally verified

        operating system -- is the emerging property of the combination of the various methods.

        \medskip

        The contribution of this paper is the shift of focus from attempts to use a single

        ``silver-bullet'' method for formal verification of an operating system to a combination

        of multiple methods supported by a suitable architecture of the operating system.

        The main benefit is a much larger coverage of the set of all hypothetical properties.

        We also argue that the approach should be suitable for the mainstream

        general-purpose operating systems in the near future, because they are gradually

        incorporating more microkernel-based features and fine-grained software components.

        Although the evaluation of the proposed approach on HelenOS is still work-in-progress, the

        preliminary results and estimates are promising.

        \medskip

        \noindent\textbf{Acknowledgments.} The author would like to express his gratitude to all contributors of

        the HelenOS project. Without their vision and dedication the work on this paper would be almost impossible

        This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic

        (grant MSM\-0021620838).

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\end{document}