A Preliminary Fault Injection Framework for Evaluating Multicore Systems

Multicore processors are becoming more and more attractive in embedded and safety-critical domains because they allow increasing the performance by ensuring reduced power consumption. However, moving to multicore systems raises novel dependability challenges: the number of cores, concurrency issues, shared resources and interconnections among cores make it hard to develop and validate software deployed on the top of multicore processors. This paper discusses a preliminary fault injection framework, which aims to investigate dependability properties of multicore-based systems. The proposed framework leverages the error reporting architecture provided by modern processors and has been instantiated in the context of the Intel Core i7 processor. Fault injection campaigns have been conducted under the Linux OS to show the benefits of the framework.