The authors address the problem of validating the dependability of fault-tolerant computing systems, in particular, the validation of the fault-tolerance mechanisms. The proposed approach is based on the use of fault injection at the physical level on a hardware/software prototype of the system considered. The place of this approach in a validation-directed design process and with respect to related work on fault injection is clearly identified. The major requirements and problems related to the development and application of a validation methodology based on fault injection are presented and discussed. Emphasis is put on the definition, analysis, and use of the experimental dependability measures that can be obtained. The proposed methodology has been implemented through the realization of a general pin-level fault injection tool (MESSALINE), and its usefulness is demonstrated by the application of MESSALINE to the experimental validation of two systems: a subsystem of a centralized computerized interlocking system for railway control applications and a distributed system corresponding to the current implementation of the dependable communication system of the ESPRIT Delta-4 Project. >

Fault injection for dependability validation: a methodology and some applications

It is time to broaden our performance-dominated research agenda. A four order of magnitude increase in performance since the first ASPLOS in 1982 means that few outside the CS&E research community believe that speed is the only problem of computer hardware and software. Current systems crash and freeze so frequently that people become violent. 1 Fast but flaky should not be our 21 st century legacy. Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC) takes the perspective that hardware faults, software bugs, and operator errors are facts to be coped with, not problems to be solved. By concentrating on Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) rather than Mean Time to Failure (MTTF), ROC reduces recovery time and thus offers higher availability. Since a large portion of system administration is dealing with failures, ROC may also reduce total cost of ownership. One to two orders of magnitude reduction in cost mean that the purchase price of hardware and software is now a small part of the total cost of ownership. In addition to giving the motivation and definition of ROC, we introduce failure data for Internet sites that shows that the leading cause of outages is operator error. We also demonstrate five ROC techniques in five case studies, which we hope will influence designers of architectures and operating systems. If we embrace availability and maintainability, systems of the future may compete on recovery performance rather than just SPEC performance, and on total cost of ownership rather than just system price. Such a change may restore our pride in the architectures and operating systems we craft.

/pdf/recovery-oriented-computing-roc-motivation-definition-59vad6jv9z.pdf

Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC): Motivation, Definition, Techniques, and Case Studies

This paper focuses on the integration of the fault injection methodology within the design process of fault-tolerant systems. Due to its wide spectrum of application and hierarchical features, VHDL has been selected as the simulation language to support such an integration. Suitable techniques for injecting faults into VHDL models are identified and depicted. Then, the main features of the MEFISTO environment aimed at supporting these techniques are described. Finally, some preliminary results obtained with MEFISTO are presented and analyzed. >

Fault injection into VHDL models: the MEFISTO tool

An important step in the development of dependable systems is the validation of their fault tolerance properties Fault injection has been widely used for this purpose, however with the rapid increase in processor complexity, traditional techniques are also increasingly more difficult to apply This paper presents a new software-implemented fault injection and monitoring environment, called Xception, which is targeted at modern and complex processors Xception uses the advanced debugging and performance monitoring features existing in most modern processors to inject quite realistic faults by software, and to monitor the activation of the faults and their impact on the target system behavior in detail Faults are injected with minimum interference with the target application The target application is not modified, no software traps are inserted, and it is not necessary to execute the target application in special trace mode (the application is executed at full speed) Xception provides a comprehensive set of fault triggers, including spatial and temporal fault triggers, and triggers related to the manipulation of data in memory Faults injected by Xception can affect any process running on the target system (including the kernel), and it is possible to inject faults in applications for which the source code is not available Experimental, results are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and potential of Xception in the evaluation of the dependability properties of the complex computer systems available nowadays

Xception: a technique for the experimental evaluation of dependability in modern computers

Defects reported between 1986 and 1989 in the MVS operating system are studied in order to gain the insight needed to provide a clear strategy for avoiding or tolerating them. Typical defects (regular) are compared to those that corrupt a program's memory (overlay), given that overlays are considered by field services to be particularly hard to find and fix. It is shown that the impact of an overlay defect is, on average, much higher than that of a regular defect, that boundary conditions and allocation management are the major causes of overlay defects, not timing, and that most overlays are small and corrupt data near the data that the programmer meant to update. Further analysis is provided on defects in fixes to other defects, failure symptoms, and the impact of defects on customers. >

/pdf/software-defects-and-their-impact-on-system-availability-a-5css0w11ni.pdf

Software defects and their impact on system availability-a study of field failures in operating systems

An automated real-time distributed accelerated fault injection environment (FIAT) is presented as an attempt to provide suitable tools for the validation process. The authors present the concepts and design, as well as the implementation and evaluation of the FIAT environment. As this system has been built, evaluated and is currently in use, an example of fault tolerant systems such as checkpointing and duplicate and match is used to show its usefulness. >

FIAT-fault injection based automated testing environment

This report addresses the problem of ascertaining the quantitative properties of dependable distributed systems. The approach is based on fault injection experimentation with two distinct real-time workloads using a fault-injection-based automated testing environment. Experimental results are presented which indicate dependability properties (e.g., error detection coverage, error latency) based on a limited number of fault injections.

Fault injection based automatic testing - Practice and examples

The results of several experiments conducted using the fault-injection-based automated testing (FIAT) system are presented. FIAT is capable of emulating a variety of distributed system architectures, and it provides the capabilities to monitor system behavior and inject faults for the purpose of experimental characterization and validation of a system's dependability. The experiments consists of exhaustively injecting three separate fault types into various locations, encompassing both the code and data portions of memory images, of two distinct applications executed with several different data values and sizes. Fault types are variations of memory bit faults. The results show that there are a limited number of system-level fault manifestations. These manifestations follow a normal distribution for each fault type. Error detection latencies are found to be normally distributed. The methodology can be used to predict the system-level fault responses during the system design stage. >

Fault injection experiments using FIAT

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FIAT-fault injection based automated testing environment

Fault injection based automatic testing - Practice and examples

Fault injection experiments using FIAT