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Experimental Analysis of FreeRTOS Dependability through Targeted Fault Injection Campaigns

Luca Mannella, Stefano Di Carlo, Alessandro Savino

Abstract

Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSes) play a crucial role in safety-critical domains, where deterministic and predictable task execution is essential. Yet they are increasingly exposed to ionizing radiation, which can compromise system dependability. To assess FreeRTOS under such conditions, we introduce KRONOS, a software-based, non-intrusive post-propagation Fault Injection (FI) framework that injects transient and permanent faults into Operating System-visible kernel data structures without specialized hardware or debug interfaces. Using KRONOS, we conduct an extensive FI campaign on core FreeRTOS kernel components, including scheduler-related variables and Task Control Blocks (TCBs), characterizing the impact of kernel-level corruptions on functional correctness, timing behavior, and availability. The results show that corruption of pointer and key scheduler-related variables frequently leads to crashes, whereas many TCB fields have only a limited impact on system availability.

Experimental Analysis of FreeRTOS Dependability through Targeted Fault Injection Campaigns

Abstract

Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSes) play a crucial role in safety-critical domains, where deterministic and predictable task execution is essential. Yet they are increasingly exposed to ionizing radiation, which can compromise system dependability. To assess FreeRTOS under such conditions, we introduce KRONOS, a software-based, non-intrusive post-propagation Fault Injection (FI) framework that injects transient and permanent faults into Operating System-visible kernel data structures without specialized hardware or debug interfaces. Using KRONOS, we conduct an extensive FI campaign on core FreeRTOS kernel components, including scheduler-related variables and Task Control Blocks (TCBs), characterizing the impact of kernel-level corruptions on functional correctness, timing behavior, and availability. The results show that corruption of pointer and key scheduler-related variables frequently leads to crashes, whereas many TCB fields have only a limited impact on system availability.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 8 sections, 5 figures, 5 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Proposed Approach
  4. Fault Injection and Result Collection Workflow
  5. Fault Injector Implementation
  6. Experimental Setup
  7. Experimental Results
  8. Conclusion

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: Overview of the main components of and their interactions.
  • Figure 2: Injections on FreeRTOSvariables: transient (on the left) and permanent (on the right) faults.
  • Figure 3: Injections on FreeRTOSpointers: transient (on the left) and permanent (on the right) faults.
  • Figure 4: Injections on FreeRTOSlists: transient (on the left) and permanent (on the right) faults.
  • Figure 5: Injections on FreeRTOScurrent TCB fields: transient (on the left) and permanent (on the right) faults.