Understanding the Propagation of Hard Errors to Software and Implications for Resilient System Design

With continued CMOS scaling, future shipped hardware will be increasingly vulnerable to in-the-field faults. To be broadly deployable, the hardware reliability solution must incur low overheads, precluding use of expensive redundancy. The authors explore a cooperative hardware-software solution that watches for anomalous software behavior to indicate the presence of hardware faults. Fundamental to such a solution is a characterization of how hardware faults in different microarchitectural structures of a modern processor propagate through the application and OS.