Efficient software-based fault isolation

  • Authors:

  • Robert Wahbe;Steven Lucco;Thomas E. Anderson;Susan L. Graham

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA;Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA;Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA;Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • SOSP '93 Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

One way to provide fault isolation among cooperating software modules is to place each in its own address space. However, for tightly-coupled modules, this solution incurs prohibitive context switch overhead. In this paper, we present a software approach to implementing fault isolation within a single address space.Our approach has two parts. First, we load the code and data for a distrusted module into its own fault do main, a logically separate portion of the application's address space. Second, we modify the object code of a distrusted module to prevent it from writing or jumping to an address outside its fault domain. Both these software operations are portable and programming language independent.Our approach poses a tradeoff relative to hardware fault isolation: substantially faster communication between fault domains, at a cost of slightly increased execution time for distrusted modules. We demonstrate that for frequently communicating modules, implementing fault isolation in software rather than hardware can substantially improve end-to-end application performance.