FIG-QEMU: A Fault Inject Platform Supporting Full System Simulation

High dependability computer system plays an important role in space application under space radiation environment. Registers in CPU (Central Processing Unit) and memory unit are the critical components of computer system security and the sensitive area of soft error. To assess the reliability of a safety-critical system, injecting random faults into these soft errors sensitive areas of the system to observe the behavior of the faulty system is a fast and effective method. In this paper, we present an efficient automated fault injection system FIG-QEMU (Fault Inject by GDB for QEMU) that simulates a variety of Single event effects, including Single event upset. The proposed system can assess not only the sensitivity of various space applications to soft errors, but also the robustness of the operating system. Our results show that 6.21% of the 5 million register faults and 3.53% of the 1.2 million memory faults will cause system crash respectively.