POWER Hypervisor Testing Suite
On most systems the CPU is vastly under-utilized. In fact often 85-95% of any given CPU's time is time spent idle.
The POWER Hypervisor, developed by IBM, can help to combat this inefficiency. This system allows many separate operating system images to share a single physical system and it's resources, keeping the performance of each image as near as possible as running the bare hardware.
However, any errors in the POWER Hypervisor layer could not only cause one partition to fail but also could compromise system integrity and crash the entire system along with all the partitions that may be running. In order to rigorously test for this possibility, we have created a Test Suite with intelligent Test Cases, using commands to the Hypervisor called 'hcalls'.
Test Modules, composed of seperate hcall Test Cases are loaded into Sessions, which allows for the quick retrieval of parameters and values. All the parameters needed to run the Test Modules can be read from a separate file, or they can be defined manually in the Settings tab.
When the a Session is started, it will proceed to test the Hypervisor layer with the provided Test Modules. The immediate results of the Test Cases are displayed in the Standard Out tab, and a more detailed analysis can be found in the Summary, Pass/Fail, and Coverage Tabs.
The Test Harness Interface is written in Java. The Test Modules are written using Perl.
Joshua Roys, Jordan Fish, Scott Judd
