Xception: a technique for the experimental evaluation ofdependability in modern computers
Carreira, J.
Madeira, H.
Silva, J.G.
Dept. de Engenharia Inf., Coimbra Univ.;
This paper appears in: Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on
Publication Date: Feb 1998
Volume: 24,
Issue: 2
On page(s): 125-136
ISSN: 0098-5589
References Cited: 49
CODEN: IESEDJ
INSPEC Accession Number: 5891880
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/32.666826
Current Version Published: 2002-08-06
Abstract
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
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