SWIF-IT: A Tool for Memory Fault Injection and Protection

Jeff Freschl, and Di Xue

Abstract: Memory corruption is a common reality in today's society where using cheap commodity parts are the norm. Such corruption can be detrimental to the stability of the Linux operating system. Our goal for Project SWIF-IT (Software-Implemented Fault Inject \& Tolerance) is to understand how resilient Linux is to random corruption of its data structures. Through software fault injection, we have found that in general, Linux crashes immediately when we corrupt an address data member, but that it is more tolerant to corruption of other data member types. We also introduce a solution called the Redundancy Repository that offers a service to detect and recover from corrupted data. Finally, we show that our solution does not introduce any significant performance overhead.

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