Efficient fault injection in QEMU

Early analysis of software dependability and fault tolerance properties requires an efficient and effective fault modelling environment before the physical prototype of the target platform is available. In this context, fault injection on cycle- accurate models implemented by means of Hardware Descrip- tion Languages (HDLs) is a quite common and valid solution. However, cycle-accurate simulation has revealed to be too time- consuming when the objective is to emulate the effect of soft errors on complex microprocessors. To address this issue, the paper presents an efficient fault injection approach based on QEMU, which is one of the most efficient and popular instruction- accurate emulator for several microprocessor architectures. As main goal, the proposed approach represents a non intrusive technique that minimizes the impact of the fault injection procedure in the emulator performance. Experimental results for both x86 and ARM processors considering permanent and transient/intermittent faults are presented.