There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you actually do fault injection in Simics. This particular post is pretty detailed, showing the actual architecture of a fault injector in Simics, not just “yes you can do it”. It includes actual diagrams of system components and how you can insert fault injection into an existing system, so it is a bit more technical than most my Wind River blog posts that tend to be more conceptual.
Tag Archives: Fault Injection
Wind River Blog: Fault Injection with Simics
Fujitsu Server Fault Injection Robot
Fault Injection is a topic that has fascinated me for a long time. Not just the area of software-to-software fault injection, but more so how you inject faults into hardware using hardware (and how to conveniently approximate this using a simulator). I just stumbled on a short interesting note about such hardware-actuated fault injection in a Fujitsu article.
Wind River Blog: “Virtual Basil Fawlty”
Last week, I posted a discussion about fault injection in virtual systems, using Basil Fawlty as the perfect example of a fault injection agent.
Freescale Online Fault-Tolerance “Demo”
I just spotted a fun little application on Freescale’s homepage: an interactive demo of the fault tolerance functions of the MPC564XL dual-core microcontroller.
Pulling the Virtual Ethernet Plug
I just read the panel interview at the start of the latest issue (Number 4, 2008) of ACM Queue. Here, you have Bryan Cantrill of Sun (the man behind dTrace) bemoan the difficulty of testing faults. In particular:
Part of the reason I’m interested in virtualization is as a development methodology. It has not delivered on this, but one of the things that I ask is can I use virtualization to automate someone pulling the Ethernet cable out of the jack? I can get a lot closer to simulating it if you let me create a toy virtual machine than I can running on the live machine.
Well, this already exists. It is a common feature to any virtual platform that is not a datacenter-oriented runtime engine like VmWare, Xen, LPAR, and its ilk. Doing fault injection is a primary use case for virtual platforms, especially for larger servers and systems featuring redundancy and fault tolerance.