A Software Layer for IDE Disk Fault Injection

Jake Adriaens, Dan Gibson

Abstract: Increasing demands for reliability, fault isolation, and fault tolerance have emphasized the need to study systems under failure conditions. Commodity disk systems have been studied for many years with simple assumptions about how they fail. To provide enabling technology for new research in more reliable file systems, disk system, and I/O interfaces, we present a flexible, software-based fault injection system, targeted for commodity disks running in conjunction with a commodity operating system. We present five sophisticated but general failure models, and a simple interface to allow arbitrary faults to be injected rapidly and without permanent hardware damage. We also evaluate the performance of a common file system utility to detect these faults, and present a summary of our findings.

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