Reliability improvement using signal handler for fault recovery in software emulator

摘要

As fast and powerful commodity processors have been developed, it has become practical to emulate on platforms built using commodity processors the proprietary hardware systems of powerful older computers that have been developed and honed over many years. The reliability and robustness of the legacy system and its emulated replacement are of utmost importance. Since the emulation system software is new and complex it may have undiscovered errors in coding which if encountered may result in an abort of the emulation program itself. This software emulation program abort is akin to a logic failure or bug in the legacy system hardware. Utilizing a signal handler in analysis and recovery from coding errors, while not taking greater risk of data corruption, increases the stability and robustness of the emulated computer system and is akin to hardware error correction in the legacy system hardware design.