Architecture of Embedded System Software

Abstract

The verification of real-life C/C++ code is inherently hard. Not only are there numerous challenging language constructs, but the precise semantics is often elusive or at best vague. This is even more true for systems software where non-ANSI compliant constructs are used, hardware is addressed directly and assembly code is embedded. In this work we present a lightweight solution to detect software bugs in C/C++ code. Our approach performs static checking on C/C++ code by means of model checking. While it cannot guarantee full functional correctness, it can be a valuable tool to increase the reliability and trustworthiness of real-life system code. This paper explains the general concepts of our approach, discusses its implementation in our C/C++ checking tool Goanna, and presents some performance results on large software packages.