Design of fault tolerant system based on runtime behavior tracing

Abstract

The current researches to improve the reliability of operating systems have been focusing on the evolution of kernel architecture or protecting against device driver errors. In particularly, the device driver errors are critical to the most of the complementary operating systems that have a kernel level device driver. Especially on special purpose embedded system, because of its limited resources and variety of devices, more serious problems are induced. Preventing data corruption or blocking the arrogation of operational level is not enough to cover the entire problems. For examples, when using device drivers, the violation of function's call sequence can cause a malfunction. Also a violation of behavior rules on system level involves the same problem. This type of errors is difficult to be detected by the previous methods. Accordingly, we designed a system that traces system behavior at runtime and recovers optimally when errors are detected. We experimented in Linux 2.6.24 kernel operating on GP2X-WIZ mobile game player.