Hurd development would benefit greatly from automated tests. Unit tests should be added for all the major components (Mach; Hurd servers and libraries). Also, functional tests can be performed on various levels: Mach; individual servers; and interaction of several servers.

(The highest level would actually be testing libc functionality, which in turn uses the various Hurd mechanisms. glibc already comes with a test suite -- though it might be desirabe to add some extra tests for exercising specific aspects of the Hurd...)

Our page on automated testing collects some relevant material.

The Goal of this task is to provide testing frameworks that allow automatically running tests as part of the Hurd and Mach build processes. The student will have to create the necessary infrastrucure, and a couple of sample tests employing it. Ideally, all the aspects mentioned above should be covered. At least some have to be ready for use and upstream merging before the end of the summer.

(As a bonus, in addition to these explicit tests, it would be helpful to integrate some methods for testing locking validity, performing static code analysis etc.)

This task probably requires some previous experience with unit testing of C programs, as well as dealing with complex build systems. No in-depth knowledge about any specific parts of the Hurd should be necessary, but some general understanding of the Hurd architecture will have to be aquired to complete this project. This makes it a very good project to get started on Hurd development

Possible mentors: ?

Exercise: Create a program performing some simple test(s) on the Hurd or Mach code. It doesn't need to be integrated in the build process yet -- a standalone progrem with it's own Makefile is fine for now.