A roving monitoring processor for detection of control flow errors in multiple processor systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new concept of on-line control flow monitoring called Roving Monitoring. This technique utilizes a special purpose roving monitoring processor in order to provide continuous and concurrent checking of instruction level control flow in multiple processor systems. The roving monitoring processor is time shared among several application processors to reduce overall monitoring overhead. The design and implementation of a roving monitoring processor with a novel architecture is presented. The roving monitoring concept is shown to be quite feasible.