Xception: A Technique for the Experimental Evaluation of Dependability in Modern Computers

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 for the modern and complex processors. Xception uses the advanced debugging and performance monitoring features existing in most of the 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). Xce...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: TSE
• Authors: Joao Carreira, Henrique Madeira, João Gabriel Silva
• Keywords: Fault Injection, Faults, Target Application, TSE 1998