Bit-error injection for software developers

Author

Heing-Becker, Marcel ; Kamph, Timo ; Schupp, Sibylle

Author_Institution

Inst. for Software Syst., Hamburg Univ. of Technol. (TUHH), Hamburg, Germany

fYear

2014

fDate

3-6 Feb. 2014

Firstpage

434

Lastpage

439

Abstract

This paper presents FITIn, a bit-error injection tool designed for evaluating software-implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT) mechanisms. Like most bit-error injection tools, FITIn injects faults at run time into the binary of a program. Unlike previous bit-error injection tools, FITIn allows a software developer to control the targets of injection campaigns at the level of a higher programming language rather than assembler. FITIn is implemented as a Valgrind plugin and has been tested for C programs. We present its architecture, demonstrate its functioning using examples from three benchmarks (Dhrystone, STAMP, and CoreMark), provide performance figures, and discuss general limitations of the approach.

Keywords

C language; fault tolerant computing; program testing; software tools; C programs; FITIn; SIHFT; Valgrind plugin; assembler; bit-error injection tool; injection campaigns; programming language; software developer; software developers; software-implemented hardware fault tolerance mechanisms; Benchmark testing; Elevators; Hardware; Registers; Robustness; Software;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Maintenance, Reengineering and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE), 2014 Software Evolution Week - IEEE Conference on

Conference_Location

Antwerp

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CSMR-WCRE.2014.6747212

Filename

6747212