FERNANDO: A Software Transient Fault Tolerance Approach for Embedded Systems Based on Redundant Multi-Threading

Abstract

As semiconductor technology scales, modern microprocessors are more vulnerable to transient faults. Software-level fault tolerance schemes are promising because they can improve reliability effectively without extra hardware. Redundant Multi-threading (RMT) uses off-the-shelf cores as redundancy to achieve error resilience. Latest software RMT fault-tolerance models do not effectively cope with transient faults occurring on multiple components during the application execution, resulting in a large number of silent data corruptions (SDC). To address this challenge, we propose FERNANDO, a software-level RMT runtime fault tolerance scheme which provides enhanced error detection and comprehensive error recovery by Triple-Modular Redundancy (TMR). On an ARM Cortex-A57 like simulated microprocessor, we performed probability model transient fault injection experiments in different components of all cores. The results demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art technique, FERNANDO can reduce the SDC rate by about 86.67 percent and optimize the execution time overhead by about 19.64 percent.

Research of the dynamic heterogeneous redundancy at thread level

“…Then synchronize the entire package at once, instead of synchronizing threads on all memory write operations in a package, which greatly reduces performance loss, and at the same time. In 2021, the FERNANDO framework proposed by Wu Haotian et al improves the static data corruption (SDC) problem that cannot be solved by the previous thread-level redundancy technology [14] and provides more efficient error detection. The use of Triple-Modular Redundancy (TMR) means to achieve error recovery.…”