Mutation-based Compliance Testing for RISC-V

Abstract

Compliance testing for RISC-V is very important. Essentially, it ensures that compatibility is maintained between RISC-V implementations and the ever growing RISC-V ecosystem. Therefore, an official Compliance Test-suite (CT) is being actively developed. However, it is very difficult to achieve that all relevant functional behavior is comprehensively tested. In this paper, we propose a mutation-based approach to boost RISC-V compliance testing by providing more comprehensive testing results. Therefore, we define mutation classes tailored for RISC-V to assess the quality of the CT and provide a symbolic execution framework to generate new test-cases that kill the undetected mutants. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We identified several serious gaps in the CT and generated new tests to close these gaps.