Bit-error injection for software developers

Abstract

This paper presents FITIn, a bit-error injection tool designed for evaluating software-implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT) mechanisms. Like most bit-error injection tools, FITIn injects faults at run time into the binary of a program. Unlike previous bit-error injection tools, FITIn allows a software developer to control the targets of injection campaigns at the level of a higher programming language rather than assembler. FITIn is implemented as a Valgrind plugin and has been tested for C programs. We present its architecture, demonstrate its functioning using examples from three benchmarks (Dhrystone, STAMP, and CoreMark), provide performance figures, and discuss general limitations of the approach.