Unified Architectural Support for Soft-Error Protection or Software Bug Detection

In this paper we propose a unified architectural support that can be used flexibly for either soft-error protection or software bug detection. Our approach is based on dynamically detecting and enforcing instructionlevel invariants. A hardware table is designed to keep track of run-time invariant information. During program execution, instructions access this table and compare their produced results against the stored invariants. Any violation of the predicted invariant suggests a potential abnormal behavior, which could be a result of a soft error or a latent software bug. In case of a soft error, monitoring invariant violations provides opportunistic soft-error protection to multiple structures in processor pipelines. Our experimental results show that invariant violations detect soft errors promptly and as a result, simple pipeline squashing is able to fix most of the detected soft errors. Meanwhile, the same approach can be easily adapted for software bug detection. The proposed a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IEEEPACT
• Authors: Martin Dimitrov, Huiyang Zhou
• Keywords: Hardware, IEEEPACT 2007, Invariant Violations, Soft Errors, Software Bug Detection