Patent ID: 6886111

Claim:
A method of testing a device driver on a data processing system, said method comprising: allocating, by an operating system, a data space for executing a device driver; setting up, by the operating system, a data exception handler that emulates a target device; executing the device driver as an application on top of the operating system to test the device driver; monitoring to detect whether a request made by the device driver specifies a target address within the data space; and in response to detecting the target address for the request being made outside of the data space, trapping on the target address for the request and executing said data exception handler that emulates a target device; wherein the setting up step further comprises: (a) calling the operating system to install a data exception handler facility containing the data exception handler into a vector of an interrupt table for the operating system; and (b) calling the data exception handler facility to register data that is used to determine when the data exception is to be taken in a data exception database table.