Dependability evaluation of COTS microprocessors via on-chip debugging facilities

Abstract

Resumen-Este artículo presenta una herramienta de inyección de fallos y la metodología para la realización de campañas de inyección de Single-Event-Upsets (SEUs) en microprocesadores Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS). Este método utiliza las ventajas que ofrecen las infraestructuras de depuración de los microprocesadores actuales, además del depurador estándar de GNU (GDB) para la ejecución y depuración de los programas de pruebas. Los experimentos desarrollados sobre microprocesadores reales, así como en las máquinas virtuales, demuestran la viabilidad y la flexibilidad de la propuesta como una solución de bajo costo para evaluar la fiabilidad de los microprocesadores COTS. Palabras claves-Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), depuración integrada en el chip, efectos de la radiación, fiabilidad de microprocesadores, inyección de fallos, errores lógicos. Abstract-This paper presents a fault injection tool and methodology for performing Single-Event-Upsets (SEUs) injection campaigns on Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) microprocessors. This method takes advantage of the debug facilities of modern

Multi-Threaded Mitigation of Radiation-Induced Soft Errors in Bare-Metal Embedded Systems

“…The injection is directed by the tool Fault Injection Manager (FIM) [25], which is in charge of calling the platform that inserts the bit-flips, restarting it after each injection and labeling the result. Thus, faults are labeled as unACE (unnecessary for Architectural Correct Execution) when an injection is made, and they do not affect the result of the program's output, SDC (Silent Data Corruption) when the result is not correct but the program ends, and HANG if it does not end or exceeds a time limit.…”

Evaluation of fault injection tools for reliability estimation of microprocessor-based embedded systems

“…Naken-FIM is a specialized tool derived from an extension of Naken [15], an open source MSP processor simulator. Their results are compared to those obtained on a real platform where runtime faults are emulated using the FIM framework [34] using the real device as the target. An MSP430 processor was selected to perform the fault campaigns.…”

“…The Fault Injection Manager (FIM) is a highly portable fault injection tool for different (ISA) processor architectures and emulation/simulation platforms [34], suitable for this research where a real device was needed to undertake a fault campaign. It uses the builtin hardware debugging facilities, such as On-Chip Debugging (OCD), and the GNU Debugger (GDB) to access internal processor resources (such as memory sections, register file, etc.)…”

Nonintrusive Automatic Compiler-Guided Reliability Improvement of Embedded Applications Under Proton Irradiation

“…The boot code used to initialize the device was not considered in the injection, which yields fault coverage estimations of greater accuracy. An extension of Fault Injection Manager framework (FIM) [19] was used for conducting the Fault Injection Campaigns. FIM automatically gathers the ground truth parameters of an executable code, such as execution time and the memory map of the different sections.…”