Pre-Conference Talk by YU Jiongchi | Bugs in Pods: Understanding Bugs in Container Runtime Systems

Container Runtime Systems (CRSs) form the foundational infrastructure of modern container-based cloud native systems such as Kubernetes. However, there lacks a comprehensive understanding of the quality issues present in CRS implementations. To bridge this gap, we conduct the first comprehensive study of CRS bugs. Specifically, we gather 429 bugs from 8,271 commits across dominant CRS projects, including runc, gvisor, containerd, and cri-o. Through manual analysis, we develop taxonomies of CRS bug symptoms and root causes, comprising 16 and 13 categories, respectively. 

Furthermore, we evaluate the capability of popular testing approaches, including unit testing, integration testing, and fuzz testing in detecting these bugs. The results show that 78.79% of the bugs cannot be detected due to the lack of test drivers, oracles, and effective test cases. Based on the findings of our study, we present implications and future research directions for various stakeholders in the domain of CRSs. Our work aims to lay the groundwork for future research on CRS bug detection. 

This is a Pre-Conference talk for The ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2024).
 

Jiongchi YU is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the SMU School of Computing and Information Systems, supervised by Prof. Xiaofei XIE. His research interests include program analysis, software testing and security. His current research focus on fuzz testing and AI-assisted attack detection in cloud systems.