Exhaustif®: a fault injection tool for distributed heterogeneous embedded systems

Abstract

This paper presents Exhaustif®, a SWIFI fault injection tool for fault tolerance verification and the validation of embedded software in distributed heterogeneous systems. Exhaustif® mainly consists of two parts: EEM and FIK. Exhaustif® Executive Manager (EEM) is a GUI Java application to define the fault injection campaign that uses a SQL database to save the test results obtained from the System under Test (SUT) in order to carry out a post injection data analysis. FIK is under the command of EEM to cary out fault injections in applications running under diverse operating systems using pure SWIFI techniques. Exhaustif® carries out floating point register and memory corruptions using temporary triggers and uses an optimized routine interception mechanism to carry out argument and return value corruption with a minimal time overhead. Two experimental Fault Injector Kernels (FIK) under the RTEMS operating system for an EADS-Astrium SPARC ERC32-based MCM processor board and i386 standard PC mainboard have been developed.