Using Virtualization to Validate Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems

Hsu, Israel; Gallagher, A. J.; Le, Michael; Tamir, Yuval

doi:10.2316/p.2010.724-031

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The goal is to first expose problem areas and then evaluate the effectiveness of the refined mechanisms to recover from a variety of system corruptions. We used the UCLA Gigan fault injector [16,9,22] to inject faults into different VI components. Gigan can reside in the VMM and inject many types of faults into the VMs and the VMM.…”

Section: Fault Injection Campaigns and Fault Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilient Virtualized Systems Using ReHype

Le,

Tamir

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

System-level virtualization introduces critical vulnerabilities to failures of the software components that implement virtualization -the virtualization infrastructure (VI). To mitigate the impact of such failures, we introduce a resilient VI (RVI) that can recover individual VI components from failure, caused by hardware or software faults, transparently to the hosted virtual machines (VMs). Much of the focus is on the ReHype mechanism for recovery from hypervisor failures, that can lead to state corruption and to inconsistencies among the states of system components.ReHype's implementation for the Xen hypervisor was done incrementally, using fault injection results to identify sources of critical corruption and inconsistencies. This implementation involved 900 LOC, with memory space overhead of 2.1MB. Fault injection campaigns, with a variety of fault types, show that ReHype can successfully recover, in less than 750ms, from over 88% of detected hypervisor failures.In addition to ReHype, recovery mechanisms for the other VI components are described. The overall effectiveness of our RVI is evaluated hosting a Web service application, on a cluster of VMs. With faults in any VI component, for over 87% of detected failures, our recovery mechanisms allow services provided by the application to be continuously maintained despite the resulting failures of VI components.

show abstract

Section: Fault Injection Campaigns and Fault Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilient Virtualized Systems Using ReHype

Le,

Tamir

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To decrease the time of restoring pristine disk images for each fault injection run, a stackable union file system (AUFS [25]) is used [11]. Each AppVM creates twoR AID-1 devices, one containing the pristine disk state as a read-only branch and the second containing a smaller empty write branch.…”

Section: Fault Injection Campaignmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We use the UCLA Gigan fault injector [14,11] to inject single bit flip faults into registers (general purpose and the program counter) while CPUs are executing VMM and DVM (user and kernel level) code. While these injected faults do not accurately represent all possible faults, theya re a good choice since transient hardware faults in CPU logic and memory are likely to be manifested as erroneous values in registers.…”

Section: Fault Injection Campaignmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilient Virtual Clusters

Hsu

Tamir

2011

2011 IEEE 17th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-Clusters of computers can provide, in aggregate, reliable services despite the failure of individual computers. System-levelv irtualization is widely used to consolidate the workload of multiple physical systems as multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical computer.Asingle physical computer thus forms a virtual cluster of VMs. Akey difficulty with virtualization is that the failure of the virtualization infrastructure (VI) often leads to the failure of multiple VMs. This is likely to overload ''cluster computing'' resiliencym echanisms, typically designed to tolerate the failure of only a single node at a time. By supporting recovery from failure of key VIc omponents, we have enhanced the resiliencyo faV I( Xen), thus enabling the use of existing ''cluster computing''t echniques to provide resilient virtual clusters. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these enhancements allowr ecovery from errors in the VI to be accomplished without the failure of more than a single VM. The resulting resiliencyo ft he virtual cluster is demonstrated by running twoe xisting ''cluster computing''s ystems while subjecting the VI to injected faults.

show abstract

“…We use the UCLA Gigan fault injector [12,9] to inject single bit flip faults into CPU registers (general purpose and the program counter) while the CPUs are executing VI code. This type of injection is used since it causes arbitrary corruptions in the VI components.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying Microreboot to System Software

Tamir

2012

2012 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Security and Reliability

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-Av ailability is increased with recovery based on component microreboot instead of whole system reboot. There areunique challenges that must be overcome in order to apply microreboot to low-levels ystem software. These challenges arise from the need to interact with immutable hardware components on one hand and, on the other hand, with a wide variety of higher levelw orkloads whose characteristics may be unknown. As an example, we describe our experience with applying microreboot to system-levelv irtualization software. Specifically,i mplementing microreboot for all the components of the widely-used Xen virtualization infrastructure. We identify the unique difficulties with applying microreboot for such low-levels oftwarea nd present our solutions. We present measures of the complexity of different classes of solutions and experimental results, based on extensive fault injection, showing the effectiveness of the solutions.

show abstract

Using Virtualization to Validate Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems

Cited by 5 publications

References 16 publications

Resilient Virtualized Systems Using ReHype

Resilient Virtualized Systems Using ReHype

Resilient Virtual Clusters

Applying Microreboot to System Software

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About