Study of fault propagation using fault injection in the UNIX system

This paper presents a fault propagation study for the UNIX operating system (Sun OS 4.1.2). Both hardware and software faults are injected in the UNIX kernel by using FINE - a fault injection and monitoring environment - to investigate the propagation of various types of faults. Based on the experimental results, fault propagation models are built and transient reward analysis is performed to evaluate the performance loss due to a fault. Results from the experiments provide insight into the vulnerable aspects of the system where the fault tolerance techniques could be used