Comprehensive Backend Support for Local Memory Fault Tolerance

Technological advances drive hardware to ever smaller feature sizes, causing devices to become more vulnerable to transient faults. Applications can be protected against faults by adding error detection and recovery measures in software. This is popularly achieved by applying automatic program transformations. However, transformations applied to program representations at abstraction levels higher than machine instructions are fundamentally incapable of protecting against vulnerabilities that are introduced during compilation. In particular, a large proportion of a program’s memory accesses are introduced by the compiler backend. This report presents a backend that protects these accesses against faults in the memory system. It is demonstrated that the presented backend can detect all single bit flips in memory that would be missed by an error detection scheme that operates on the LLVM intermediate representation of programs. The presented compiler backend is obtained by modifying the LLVM backend for the x86 architecture. On a subset of SPEC CINT2006 the runtime overhead incurred by the backend modifications amounts to 1.50x for the 32-bit processor architecture i386, and 1.13x for the 64-bit architecture x86_64. To achieve comprehensive detection of memory faults, the modified backend implements an adjusted calling convention that leaves library function calls transparent and intact