A compiler-based infrastructure for fault-tolerant co-design

Abstract

The protection of processor-based systems to mitigate the harmful effects of transient faults (hardening) is gaining importance as technology shrinks. Hybrid hardware/software hardening approaches are promising alternatives in the design of such fault tolerant systems. This paper presents a compiler-based infrastructure for facilitating the exploration of the design space between hardware-only and software-only fault tolerant techniques. The compiler design is based on a generic architecture that facilitates the implementation of software-based techniques, providing an uniform isolated-from-target hardening core. In this way, these methods can be implemented in an architecture independent way and can easily integrate new protection mechanisms to automatically produce hardened code. The infrastructure includes a simulator that provides information about memory and execution time overheads to aid the designer in the co-design decisions. The tool-chain is complemented by a hardware fault emulation tool that allows to measure the fault coverage of the different solutions running on the real system. A case study was implemented allowing to evaluate the flexibility of the infrastructure to fit the reliability requirements of the system within their memory and performance restrictions.