A Cooperative Approach to Virtual Machine Based Fault Injection

Abstract

Resilience investigations often employ fault injection (FI) tools to study the effects of simulated errors on a target system. It is important to keep the target system under test (SUT) isolated from the controlling environment in order to maintain control of the experiement. Virtual machines (VMs) have been used to aid these investigations due to the strong isolation properties of system-level virtualization. A key challenge in fault injection tools is to gain proper insight and context about the SUT. In VM-based FI tools, this challenge of target context is increased due to the separation between host and guest (VM). We discuss an approach to VM-based FI that leverages virtual machine introspection (VMI) methods to gain insight into the target’s context running within the VM. The key to this environment is the ability to provide basic information to the FI system that can be used to create a map of the target environment. We describe a proof-of-concept implementation and a demonstration of its use to introduce simulated soft errors into an iterative solver benchmark running in user-space of a guest VM.