ESIFT: Efficient System for Error Injection

Computer use in high dependability applications is rapidly increasing. These applications require the computer to be able to detect, locate, isolate and recover from software, hardware or security attacks errors. To evaluate the dependability of a computer system design, it is critical to be able to assess its ability to detect, locate, recover from errors, and to estimate coverage and latencies. Fault-injection tools play critical role in the evaluation and validation of dependable systems. They generate statistics on error coverage and latencies. This helps to identify good fault tolerance technique that detects and prevent system failures. In this paper, we present an Efficient Fault Injection System for Transient Fault (ESIFT). ESIFT is based on Python extended GDB which makes ESIFT portable across a wide variety of systems. ESFIT operates at near native speed enabling the dependability evaluation of large system. Unlike traditional techniques which evaluate only the faulty system behavior, ESIFT evaluates, concurrently, both the faulty and the fault-free system behavior. This allows faster error detection and latency evaluation.