Subj : Testing of access control on shared data
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : Bart van Ingen Schenau
Date : Mon Jun 27 2005 02:31 pm

Hello All,

For a project I have to make some changes to the access controls that
we have in place for data that is shared between different threads.
(Shared means in this context that different threads can/will access
the data in the normal course of events.)

My question is, what strategies can I use to test/verify that my
changes have not introduced any bugs in the software?

For reference, the project runs on top of a Nucleous OS, which only
supports multi-threading with a single address space.
For synchronisation between threads, there are three methods
available:
- Interrupt level (Disabling interrupts)
- Scheduler level (Preventing pre-emptive scheduling)
- Data level (using Mutex/Semaphore)

Currently, we are mainly using the scheduler level synchronisation,
but the system architects want us to switch to mutexes as much as
possible.
My task is to make a proposal for the rfequired changes, and for a
test strategy.

Thanks in advance,

Bart v Ingen Schenau

.