Tolerating hardware device failures in software

Abstract

Hardware devices can fail, but many drivers assume they do not. When confronted with real devices that misbehave, these assumptions can lead to driver or system failures. While major operating system and device vendors recommend that drivers detect and recover from hardware failures, we find that there are many drivers that will crash or hang when a device fails. Such bugs cannot easily be detected by regular stress testing because the failures are induced by the device and not the software load. This paper describes Carburizer, a code-manipulation tool and associated runtime that improves system reliability in the presence of faulty devices. Carburizer analyzes driver source code to find locations where the driver incorrectly trusts the hardware to behave. Carburizer identified almost 1000 such bugs in Linux drivers with a false positive rate of less than 8 percent. With the aid of shadow drivers for recovery, Carburizer can automatically repair 840 of these bugs with no programmer involvement. To facilitate proactive management of device failures, Carburizer can also locate existing driver code that detects device failures and inserts missing failure-reporting code. Finally, the Carburizer runtime can detect and tolerate interrupt-related bugs, such as stuck or missing interrupts.