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Archive for the ‘ Systems Testing ’ Category

Demystifying USB 3.0 legacy compatibility testing

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at 10:37 am   - Posted by Subodh Bhide

USB 2.0 and 1.1 devices have been around for a long time and will continue to sustain even in the presence of the new, faster and efficient 3.0 version. These two oldies, which I like to call legacy specification are so popular, that till 2008, 2 billion USB devices were sold every year, taking the total number to 6 billion devices (source Wikipedia); making USB the most successful computing interface of all time.

Computer hardware manufacturers are already gearing up to ship USB 3.0 devices and controllers in huge volumes. With 1 million PC sold each day in 2010, the PC market is booming and alarmingly spreading. This has set a perfect stage for USB 3.0 to become the mainstream of computing interfaces to replace USB 2.0.

But what about the 6 billion legacy devices and the older USB controllers. Would they connect to USB 3.0 devices?

The SuperSpeed USB specification has provisions for this backward compatibility. Also, USB 3.0 manufacturers cannot afford to not support the vast USB 2.0 user base. This means that USB 3.0 legacy compatibility will become critical.

Legacy compatibility testing with 6 billion devices is impossible, but we thought that practically it could be made simpler. We analyzed different USB use cases and identified five (5) different compatibility test nodes (highlighted in blue in the image).

  1. The devices segmented into 9 functional buckets
  2. The connectors / cables
  3. Intermediate hubs
  4. Controllers / add-on cards
  5. Operating system drivers

Combinations of these 5 testable areas would will yield compatibility test scenarios. But the scenario count will be pretty high, making it difficult to exercise. However, a careful and intelligent way of partitioning these test areas, can help achieve optimum number of test scenarios without loss of coverage.

 

Windows 8 Store – Who are the favorites to be published?

Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 12:04 pm   - Posted by Subodh Bhide

Windows App StoreMicrosoft is making the news again, first with Windows 7 crossing 150 million license sales and very recently due to the leaked presentation slides from the Windows 8 OS Strategy. The content lists new features like face recognition, touch screens, Windows store etc, which will best suit the future market needs.

I am personally excited about the Windows Store idea, which will be similar to the immensely popular Apple AppStore. The leaked presentation has not been officially endorsed by Microsoft, but it absolutely makes sense for Microsoft to jump on the app store bandwagon. Moreover, although Windows 8 is slated to hit the market in 2012, Microsoft could very likely bring the store idea in Windows 7 itself. (more…)

 

Windows Logo Testing – What is holding us back?

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 6:08 pm   - Posted by Subodh Bhide

Windows Logo Testing Conformance Testing Systems TestingWe all test our products and have high quality standards. But is the end user aware of our standards? Does he trust our claim of delivering flawless products? I am sure that in majority cases, the answer is going to be a NO. Unfortunately, end users just don’t trust the manufacturer’s word on quality. However, there is one way to increase users’ confidence.. and that is through compliance testing.  Windows Logo Test is one such compliance program that is designed for ensuring strict compliance with Windows OS design and standards. From my personal observations, the buyer’s anxiety level is drastically reduced  when they see a Microsoft Logo artwork on the product. It gives them the confidence that the product will be of (more…)

 

SuperSpeed USB 3.0: A Perfect Complement to Solid-state Drives?

Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 4:51 am   - Posted by Subodh Bhide

Super fast USB 3.0 and colossal SSD seems to be like a perfect marriage, with the two clearly complementing each other.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0, as the name suggests, aims to be much faster than its predecessors, the Hi-Speed USB 2.0. With a signaling rate of 5 Gbps, usb.org claims a 10x performance boost over Hi-Speed. As I had mentioned in my previous post on SSD, the capacity of flash NAND based SSDs is on the rise. Few hundreds of giga bytes have now become standard capacities. As this type of storage reaches the enterprise world, the struggle for capacity increase will continue, and in the near future, we will have SSDs with terra byte capacities.

Now, even as SSD is a great improvement over traditional storage media, and enables massive storage spaces, without the fast speeds of data transfer, the large amount of storage would be severely restricted. To get a sense of the enormity of this problem, consider this: Based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation, USB 2.0 will take approximately 73 minutes to read 250 GB of data whereas USB 3.0 will take 7.5 minutes (not considering any types of latencies). So, combining USB 3.0 and SSD together will give us an almost perfect combination that includes a large capacity source (or a sink) and a very fast channel to move data in and out of it.

A close analysis of the specifications brings out 5 primary reasons that make USB 3.0 so fast –

  1. Physically, USB 3.0 implements 2 additional twisted signal pairs than USB 2.0 for carrying data.
  2. At a protocol level, SuperSpeed implements a dual-simplex unicast bus for concurrent bi-directional operations. Earlier versions of USB used the slow, half-duplex broadcast bus.
  3. Data Bursting in USB 3.0 allows the end points to send / receive data packets with no time wastage for handshakes. Though error prone, this gives greater efficiency when data is transferred in burst mode.
  4. USB 3.0 has introduced streaming capabilities for bulk type of transfers. This allows multiple streams (between 1 and 65533 in number) to be established over the same pipe. This gives a much greater bandwidth for data transfer.
  5. SuperSpeed USB 3.0 does not work on a serial transaction model like USB 2.0, where the host has to wait for an acknowledgment of a transaction before initiating a new transaction. Instead, USB 3.0 uses a sort of split transaction model, which allows multiple transactions at the same time. This kind of parallel processing results in improved response time.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 specification has surely set the stage for USB to be an ideal channel for data transfer from SSD. However, the real picture will emerge as USB 3.0 gets absorbed into the main stream by year 2011 and the way it stands up to competitive technologies like SATA and PCI Express.

 

Windows Device Driver Testing – A Simplified Approach

Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 3:41 am   - Posted by Subodh Bhide

Windows Device Driver Testing Windows Driver Foundation

Development of Windows device drivers was greatly simplified when Microsoft introduced the Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) in 2005-06. WDF gave an object oriented look to the traditional Windows Driver Model (WDM). One of the results was that driver developers could focus on the core functionalities of their device, and could leave the Windows OS specific stuff to the new frameworks.

While the development of device drivers has been simplified, testing them is still like a complex puzzle for many people. The traditional approach is based on ad-hoc means of generating test plans and test cases that treat device drivers as a black box. As a result, critical features are missed out or don’t get enough attention. In this blog post, I will try to structure device driver testing by listing the (more…)
 

Are Solid-State Drives blurring the boundaries between Enterprise, Entertainment and Portable storage?

Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 4:19 am   - Posted by Subodh Bhide

Solid State Drives Enterprise Storage

In this multi-part series of blog posts, I want to highlight the trends in Solid-State Drives or SSDs as storage devices and understand some of the challenges it faces. We at Harbinger Systems have been testing and developing Windows applications around storage systems for over four years. Based on our experience in working with some of the companies in the industry and interacting with storage industry experts in conferences and expos, it is clear that this space is in the midst of some very important changes. In this first post, we try to understand if Solid-State Drives or SSDs could be the future of storage. In my subsequent post, I will talk about (more…)

 
 
What are the trends that are defining the technology world? What is impacting the user interface, design, development and delivery of software? This blog explores the state of technology and the goings on at Harbinger Systems.

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