Software-Specific Hardware Failure Profile
Bing Hua Huang, Xiaojun Li, Ming Li, J.B. Bernstein, Carol S. Smidts · 2005
It has been identified that hardware malfunction is one of the main causes of software failures. The impact of hardware failures on software behavior has been studied by many using the fault injection technique, which requires prior knowledge of the fault probability distribution. This prior distribution is used to guide the fault injection time, location, and the fault type to be injected. However, this information is hardly obtainable without complete knowledge of the hardware. A simulation-based approach has been proposed to estimate the software reliability in light of hardware failures. The hardware failure profile for each hardware component can be extracted from the simulation. This profile is software-specific, not a simple uniform distribution as being assumed by many others. This paper discusses the factors that affect this profile and more specifically examines the effect of software size, inputs and compiler on this hardware failure profile.