Fine-grained fault tolerance using device checkpoints

Kadav, Asim; Renzelmann, Matthew J.; Swift, Michael M.

doi:10.1145/2499368.2451168

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…We are not aware of work closely related to DMA interface validation on the device side. Nevertheless, some research on driver testing/verification [12], [22] validates DMA interfaces from the driver side. A previous work [24] detects malwares residing in DMA interface by verifying specific DMA operation properties.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Validating direct memory access interfaces with conformance checking

Li¹,

Cong²,

Yang³

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD)

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Direct Memory Access (DMA) interfaces are a common and important component of Hardware/Software (HW/SW) interfaces between peripheral devices and their device drivers. We present a HW/SW co-validation framework to validate DMA interface implementations of a device and its driver. This framework employs a virtual prototype of the device as a reference model and performs co-validation in two stages: (1) conformance checking which checks the DMA interface conformance between the device and its virtual prototype; (2) property checking which checks device/driver interactions across the DMA interface. In conformance checking, the virtual prototype infers the device state transitions by taking the same driver request sequence to the device. Property checking verifies system properties over the device state transitions exposed through the virtual prototype. This framework assists HW/SW integration validation by detecting DMA interface bugs in both devices and drivers. Furthermore, we have developed three key techniques: capture-on-write policy, partial capture, and environmental input prediction, to address two major challenges in scaling the framework: DMA capture overhead and imprecise environmental input simulation. We have applied this approach to four Ethernet adapters, discovering 12 serious DMA interface bugs from the devices, their virtual prototypes and their drivers. The results demonstrate that our approach has major potential in facilitating HW/SW co-validation.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Validating direct memory access interfaces with conformance checking

Li¹,

Cong²,

Yang³

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD)

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“…Many methods have been proposed to improve the reliability of drivers, such as Nooks [12], Shadow Driver [7], FGFT [13]. While there are seldom researches directly focus on paired functions for drivers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

PF-Miner: A New Paired Functions Mining Method for Android Kernel in Error Paths

Liu

Wang

Jiang

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE 38th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

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Drivers are significant components of the operating systems(OSs), and they run in kernel mode. Generally, drivers have many errors to handle, and the functions called in the normal execution paths and error handling paths are in pairs, which are named as paired functions. However, some developers do not handle the errors completely as they forget about or are unaware of releasing the acquired resources, thus memory leaks and other potential problems can be easily introduced. Therefore, it is highly valuable to automatically extract paired functions for these problems and detect violations for the programmers.This paper proposes an efficient tool named PFMiner, which can automatically extract paired functions and detect violations between normal execution paths and error handling paths from the source code of C program with the data mining and statistical methods. We have evaluated PFMiner on different versions of Android kernel 2.6.39 and 3.10.0, and 81 bugs reported by PF-Miner in 2.6.39 have been fixed before the latest version 3.10.0. PF-Miner only needs about 150 seconds to analyze the source code of 3.10.0, and 983 violations have been detected from 546 paired functions that have been extracted. We have reported the top 51 violations as potential bugs to the developers, and 15 bugs have been confirmed.

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“…It divides the privilege of the sharing module by the principle. FGFT [24] isolates driver at the granularity of a single entry point and uses the existing powermanagement code to save and restore device state. However, most of these methods require the programmer to clearly add annotations to the interfaces between the kernel and the driver, and to modify the driver to add runtime checks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transparent driver-kernel isolation with VMM intervention

Zheng

Wang²,

Wang

et al. 2013

Proceedings of the First ACM SIGOPS Conference on Timely Results in Operating Systems

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How to satisfy the on-demand environment while providing highly dependable services with minimum cost is a challenging issue. Improvements in the reusability of virtualization technology have enabled operating system's adaptability, which helps users customize their application environments by using various types and versions of operating systems and drivers. However, driver faults in virtual machine are a critical obstacle to achieve reliable user environment, and may even harm the reliability of the entire server. This paper describes Chariot which transparently isolates drivers in a virtual machine without affecting the reusability of the virtualization environment. An isolation loading mechanism links an isolated driver with monitoring wrappers in a virtual machine, which avoids modifying the VM kernel and drivers. According to the monitoring information, Chariot not only instantaneously updates the access control table which records the memory used by the driver, but also sets the write protection of the shadow page table which is corresponding to the whole kernel space of the virtual machine. As a result, the write operations of a driver can be captured and examined in advance. Experimental results show that Chariot can effectively isolate driver faults and improve the reliability of the operating system in a virtual machine. Furthermore, Chariot can be easily extended to isolate new drivers and ported to other versions of operating systems.

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Fine-grained fault tolerance using device checkpoints

Cited by 8 publications

References 34 publications

Validating direct memory access interfaces with conformance checking

Validating direct memory access interfaces with conformance checking

PF-Miner: A New Paired Functions Mining Method for Android Kernel in Error Paths

Transparent driver-kernel isolation with VMM intervention

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