Boosting software fault injection for dependability analysis of real-time embedded applications

Abstract

The design of complex embedded systems deployed in safety-critical or mission-critical applications mandates the availability of methods to validate the system dependability across the whole design flow. In this article we introduce a fault injection approach, based on loadable kernel modules and running under the Linux operating system, which can be adopted as soon as a running prototype of the systems is available. Moreover, for the purpose of decoupling dependability analysis from hardware availability, we also propose the adoption of hardware virtualization. Extensive experimental results show that statistical analysis made on top of virtual prototypes are in good agreement with the information disclosed by fault detection trends of real platforms, even under real-time constraints. ACM Reference Format:Cabodi, G., Murciano, M., and Violante, M. 2010. Boosting software fault injection for dependability analysis of real-time embedded applications.

KITO tool: A fault injection environment in Linux kernel data structures

“…Kernel modules are objects that are introduced into the kernel and are capable of exporting kernel symbols that can be functions or data structures. An implementation of such modules can be seen in [33]: this approach provides on-demand access to the application's virtual address space, as well as to the processor's context, and it injects into the applications' data segment and code segment, omitting the elements of the kernel that provide services to the applications.…”

Automatic fault injection for driver robustness testing

“…Fault injection techniques are widely used for software and system testing [13,20,21,22,24], ranging from testing the reliability of device drivers to testing operating systems, embedded systems and real-time systems [3,7,14,15,18,23,27].…”