摘要 |
A mechanism for isolating failures in a digital system is provided. In one embodiment, a fault table is defined for each unit in the system. Related faults are ordered within the table to reflect the time-order in which the faults would be activated during operation of the associated unit. When multiple related faults are reported for a given unit in the system, the fault that is first located when a linear search of the corresponding fault table is conducted is considered the source of the failure within the unit. If faults are reported for multiple units, the source of the failure for the system is identified using at least one of primary and second priority values assigned to the faults, timestamps obtained when the faults are reported, and an order in which the faults are logged. |