ABSTRACT

Workshop on Reliable Embedded Systems, in conjunction with the 20th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems October 28, 2001, New Orleans, LA.

Testing the Portability of Desktop Applications to a
Networked Embedded System

Michael W. Bigrigg** and Joseph G. Slember*

Institute for Complex Engineered Systems**
Electrical and Computer Engineering*
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

Applications that were engineered for desktop environments are often ported to networked embedded systems and mobile environments which have a higher rate of errors due to variable and intermittent connectivity. In embedded systems there is a lack of additional hardware resources, which then requires the software to handle far more and to be increasingly robust. This paper examines the ability of common desktop applications to gracefully handle error conditions when ported to an unreliable networked embedded system. The focus of the testing is the ability of the GNU binutils and textutils to catch and properly handle error return values from the Standard C I/O library.

FULL PAPER: pdf