Low-Cost Software Control-Flow Error Recovery

In modern safety-critical embedded systems reliability and performance are two important criteria. In many systems based on off-the-shelf processors software implemented error recovery is the only option to improve the reliability of the system. However, software methods typically introduce large performance overheads. Another important factor in error recovery schemes is the recovery time, especially in systems with real-time requirements. A key observation that helps improve software recovery methods is that only a defined number of locations in the program are susceptible to errors. In this paper we propose a fast software recovery scheme that instruments the program only at locations vulnerable to control-flow errors. We use a systematic bit-flip analysis to identify the exact locations susceptible to control-flow errors in a given program. This helps us to instrument the code with minimal overheads, while maintaining high-level of correct-ability and low recovery times. Our experiments show that using the result of our bit-flip analysis and limiting the code instrumentation to only the susceptible locations improves the efficiency by a factor of 80 when compared to the latest control-flow error recovery methods.