FTXen: Making hypervisor resilient to hardware faults on relaxed cores

Abstract

As CMOS technology scales, the Increasingly smaller transistor components are susceptible to a variety of in-field hardware errors. Traditional redundancy techniques to deal with the increasing error rates are expensive and energy inefficient. To address this emerging challenge, many researchers have recently proposed the idea of relaxed hardware design and exposing errors to software. For such relaxed hardware to become a reality, it is crucially important for system software, such as the virtual machine hypervisor, to be resilient to hardware faults. To address the above fundamental software challenge in enabling relaxed hardware design, we are making a major effort in restructuring an important part of system software, namely the virtual machine hypervisor, to be resilient to faulty cores. A fault in a relaxed core can only affect those virtual machines (and applications) running on that core, but the hypervisor and other virtual machines remain intact and continue providing services. We have redesigned every component of Xen, a large, popular virtual machine hypervisor, to achieve such error resiliency. This paper presents our design and implementation of the restructured Xen (we refer to it as FTXen). Our experimental evaluation on real systems shows that FTXen adds minimum application overhead, and scales well to different ratios of reliable and relaxed cores. Our results with random fault injection show that FTXen can successfully survive all injected hardware faults.