This new journal article may be of interest to some simh-list readers: @String{j-TOSEM = "ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology"}
@Article{Martignoni:2013:MTC, author = "Lorenzo Martignoni and Roberto Paleari and Alessandro Reina and Giampaolo Fresi Roglia and Danilo Bruschi", title = "A methodology for testing {CPU} emulators", journal = j-TOSEM, volume = "22", number = "4", pages = "29:1--29:??", month = oct, year = "2013", CODEN = "ATSMER", DOI = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2522920.2522922", ISSN = "1049-331X (print), 1557-7392 (electronic)", ISSN-L = "1049-331X", bibdate = "Wed Oct 30 12:18:03 MDT 2013", bibsource = "http://www.acm.org/pubs/contents/journals/tosem/; http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/tosem.bib", abstract = "A CPU emulator is a software system that simulates a hardware CPU. Emulators are widely used by computer scientists for various kind of activities (e.g., debugging, profiling, and malware analysis). Although no theoretical limitation prevents developing an emulator that faithfully emulates a physical CPU, writing a fully featured emulator is a very challenging and error prone task. Modern CISC architectures have a very rich instruction set, some instructions lack proper specifications, and others may have undefined effects in corner cases. This article presents a testing methodology specific for CPU emulators, based on fuzzing. The emulator is ``stressed'' with specially crafted test cases, to verify whether the CPU is properly emulated or not. Improper behaviors of the emulator are detected by running the same test case concurrently on the emulated and on the physical CPUs and by comparing the state of the two after the execution. Differences in the final state testify defects in the code of the emulator. We implemented this methodology in a prototype (named as EmuFuzzer), analyzed five state-of-the-art IA-32 emulators (QEMU, Valgrind, Pin, BOCHS, and JPC), and found several defects in each of them, some of which can prevent proper execution of programs.", acknowledgement = ack-nhfb, articleno = "29", fjournal = "ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology", } ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 be...@acm.org be...@computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh