Debugging Device Drivers

Abstract

Can youname a developer that can develop a bug-free software unit excluding “Hello World” program? I thought not. The main reason that the development cycle of software is such a lengthy process is errors in the code implementation, better known as “bugs” (with “debugging” becoming the word to describe the process of sieving these bugs out of the software). The end result of the existence of bugs in software is that the executable will fail at one time or another. The complexity of developing software that manages hardware is directly accountable for bugs that are manifold more complex and hard to fix. The most difficult bugs to fix are bugs that occur infrequently and cannot be easily reproduced. These are usually the logical bugs rather than the coding bugs. Kernel mode device drivers present the added danger of crashing the system if failure occurs in their code.