NQC²: A Non-Intrusive QEMU Code Coverage Plugin

Abstract

Code coverage analysis has become a standard approach in software development, facilitating the assessment of test suite effectiveness, the identification of under-tested code segments, and the discovery of performance bottlenecks. When code coverage of software for embedded systems needs to be measured, conventional approaches quickly meet their limits. A commonly used approach involves instrumenting the source files with added code that collects and dumps coverage information during runtime. This inserted code usually relies on the existence of an operating and a file system to dump the collected data. These features are not available for bare-metal programs that are executed on embedded systems.

Authors 7

1. Nils Bosbach Aachen Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

2. Alwalid Salama Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Germany

3. Lukas Jünger
   Affiliation as printed

   MachineWare GmbH, Germany

4. Mark Burton

   Qualcomm (United States)

   Affiliation as printed

   Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., France

5. Niko Zurstraßen Aachen Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

6. Rebecca Pelke Aachen Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

7. Rainer Leupers Aachen Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Germany