FaLoFiN:a Hardware Fault Localization Approach via Filtering Nondeterminacy

System level verification by running existing commodity software stacks is essential for achieving a high quality SoC design.However, it is hard to find the root cause of hardware faults when running large commodity software stacks.A hardware fault localization approach by filtering out nondeterministic behaviors is proposed.This approach is called FaLoFiN.The approach first extracts the nondeterministic function call set.Then it filters out this nondeterministic function call set from a reference run and a faulty run respectively.Finally it localizes the code scope related to hardware faults through comparing the filtered function call sets, and locating the abnormal function call.The experimental results show that FaLoFiN can localize injected hardware faults with high accuracy.Moreover, FaLoFiN localized real hardware faults in the PKUnity-86 system effectively.