Towards the design of a snoopy coprocessor for dynamic software-fault detection

Dynamic Monitoring with Integrity Constraints (DynaMICs) is a software-fault monitoring approach in which the constraints are maintained separately from the program. Since the constraints are not entwined in the code, the approach facilitates the maintenance of the application and constraint code. Through code analysis during compilation, the points at which constraint checking should occur are determined. DynaMICs minimizes performance degradation, addressing a problem that has limited the use of runtime software-fault monitoring. This paper presents the preliminary design of a DynaMICs snoopy-coprocessor system, i.e., one that employs a coprocessor that utilizes bus-monitoring hardware to facilitate the concurrent execution of the application and constraint-checking code. In this approach, the coprocessor executes the constraint-checking code while the main processor executes the application code.