What is fault masking?

testing masking fault
Guri picture Guri · Sep 24, 2010 · Viewed 15.3k times · Source

Can anybody explain what fault masking is, and and what its consequences are?

Answer

Michael Petrotta picture Michael Petrotta · Sep 24, 2010

From Wikipedia:

a way to ignore faults by seamlessly preparing a backup component to execute something as soon as the instruction is sent, using a sort of voting protocol where if the main and backups don't give the same results, the flawed output is ignored.

Imagine the five CPUs on the Space Shuttle, all crunching the same numbers. If one of them produces an anomalous result, that result is ignored. The other four CPUs "won the election" and "masked" (hid) the bad result.

Related questions

How to solve the error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol - function?

I get this error, but I don't know how to fix it. I'm using Visual Studio 2013. I made the solution name MyProjectTest This is the structure of my test solution: -function.h #ifndef MY_FUNCTION_H #define MY_FUNCTION_H …

Read More
How to check if a string array contains one string in JavaScript?

I have a string array and one string. I'd like to test this string against the array values and apply a condition the result - if the array contains the string do "A", else do "B". How can I do …

Read More
Unit Testing C Code

I worked on an embedded system this summer written in straight C. It was an existing project that the company I work for had taken over. I have become quite accustomed to writing unit tests in Java using JUnit but …

Read More