An empirical study on patterns of failure causes in a mass-market operating system

Abstract

In this paper we present an empirical study on patterns of operating system failure causes. We surveyed 566 computers and collected 7,007 real failures of operating systems. We found that 87.97+ of the failures were caused by faults related to software updating. We found strong evidences of autocorrelation among operating system failure causes, i.e., the same failure occurs multiple times successively and due to the same cause; or different failures occur simultaneously due to a common cause. Cross-correlation among different failure causes was also observed and discussed. We discovered 47 genuine patterns of operating system failure causes with 156,866 occurrences in the analyzed dataset.