pTest: An adaptive testing tool for concurrent software on embedded multicore processors

More and more processor manufacturers have launched embedded multicore processors for consumer electronics products because such processors provide high performance and low power consumption to meet the requirements of mobile computing and multimedia applications. To effectively utilize computing power of multicore processors, software designers interest in using concurrent processing for such architecture. The master-slave model is one of the popular programming models for concurrent processing. Even if it is a simple model, the potential concurrency faults and unreliable slave systems still lead to anomalies of entire system. In this paper, we present an adaptive testing tool called pTest to stress test a slave system and to detect the synchronization anomalies of concurrent software in the master-slave systems on embedded multicore processors. We use a probabilistic finite-state automaton(PFA) to model the test patterns for stress testing and shows how a PFA can be applied to pTest in practice.