Experimental evaluation of a COTS system for space applications

Abstract

This paper evaluates the impact of transient errors in the operating system of a COTS-based system (CETIA board with two PowerPC 750 processors running LynxOS) and quantifies their effects at both the OS and at the application level. The study has been conducted using a Software-Implemented Fault Injection tool (Xception) and both realistic programs and synthetic workloads (to focus on specific OS features) have been used. The results provide a comprehensive picture of the impact of faults on LynxOS key features (process scheduling and the most frequent system calls), data integrity, error propagation, application termination, and correctness of application results.