Research On Software Fault Injection Techniques Based On Chip S698

Some fields, such as aviation and aerospace, medical, industrial production,national defense and military and many other fields, have strict requirements forreliability of computer. So it is very important to research the design of fault tolerantcomputers and software application with fault tolerance mechanism. Fault injectiontechnique accelerates system failure by injecting the fault. This technique caneffectively evaluate the fault tolerance performance of fault tolerant computer system ina short period of time. It is a powerful and essential tool to help design and realize thefault tolerant computer system.In this paper, we design and implement a fault injection tool which can inject faultssuch as modify the key registers, wreck code segment, enter illegal work area, go intothe dead cycle, software doesn t feed dog, interface devices work abnormal into thesoftware system running on the chip S698by researching the software fault techniqueand chip S698. The tool collect the fault injection parameters from user by the controluser-interface running on the ordinary personal computer and transform them into faultinjection command, then send the command to the embedded system running on thechip S698by the serial port, when the serial port interrupt handler receive the commandsuccessfully, it inject the desired type of the fault and send the feedback to personalcomputer by the same serial port. In addition, the tool can use the timing function of thetimer on chip S698to inject some meaningful intermittent fault type such as modifiedthe key registers. When injecting the fault into the registers, we use the register windowrotation which is the special characteristic of the Sparc processor to find the storagelocation of the registers whose values are saved automatically during the interruption.By rotating the register window and modifying the contents in the storage location, wecan inject the fault successfully. At the same time, for the registers which are not saved,we can visit and modify them by rotating to the register window which contains them.Finally, we use the implemented software fault injection tool to do a fault injectionexperiment in which the target fault injection software system is a matrix calculationprogram running on chip S698, and analysis the influence of each type of fault on thetarget system according to the experimental results.